Laughing Fish

Oh, The Places You'll Go!

2012-01-07T23:17:00.002-07:00

This one is good, from one of my favorite books:

Article Comparing the Occupy Movement to Populism

2011-12-29T22:10:00.000-07:00

Worth a read, check it out: http://www.peacefuluprising.org/how-the-people-got-their-groove-back-what-a-bunch-of-farmers-can-teach-a-bunch-of-occupiers-about-how-to-keep-on-going-20111215#comment-70767.

I like it, it is good, read it. That being said, the Farmers’ Alliance and the populists voted on things. They didn’t practice “true consensus”. Neither did the labor movements in the early to mid 1900s or the civil rights movements. I personally think voting which is easily understood and learned is more empowering and inclusive to people than is lecturing them on confusing hand signals and why “90-10″ consensus (or worse) that allows tiny minorities to balk the will of overwhelming quantities of rational people in a room is a good idea. Consensus was invented, in my opinion, by small groups of internally oriented and often unsuccessful activists who had very limited perspectives on or experience with mass participation. They often came from academic circles and were trying to build movements in a period of generalized working class retreat from political activity. In my humble opinion, trying to impose consensus today on a new and actually vibrant movement is as mechanical and unhelpful as is a dogmatic “marxist” distributing their newspaper outside the factory gates and telling the workers if they don’t organize in such and such a way and join this or that party, they are somehow wrong or "counter revolutionary".

I agree with Malcolm X that “I’m for what works”. If occupying something works, I’m for that. If consensus can work (I don’t see this happening), I’m for that. If voting works, I’m for that. Sometimes voting doesn’t work, like drawing up a schedule at work. Have you ever made a schedule for a job? It can be confusing and you can’t make one in a room with 70 employees all trying to make it and trying to vote on every shift. You have to get everyone’s availability and skill level and then you need one person to centralize that information and then draw it up. Of course you can always modify it later, and switch shifts with people, and make it a little more efficient, but it is an example of a time of organization where mass democracy is better suited if it elects one person to do it. Same thing with making a flyer. You don’t make a flyer with 70 people all trying to think of how to format it, crowded around one screen. You can delegate.

What is great about the current moment is that authoritarian, Russian and Chinese style single party police state “communism” is discredited and the parts of the left that always looked to foreign governments (instead of to their own conditions) for their blessings of purity and a correct, general party “line”… that kind of politics doesn’t dominate the left any more. That part of the left is gone and what is left of it doesn’t convince anyone.

At the same time, the liberal left that tells us to always vote democratic party is also discredited. Nothing better for that than to actually elect a democrat. That’s why Nader was so strong in 2000, and not in 2004 or 2008. People just had 8 years of democrats and they knew they didn’t work.

Similarly, nothing out of the “anti-globalization” or anti war movements is really that large or real, in terms of impressive sizes of any organizations, or victories in terms of number of battles won that we can learn from. That kind of punk rock anarchism that the black block kids were into, or the people who tried to split from every anti war march and go down another street and break things, that hasn’t won or gotten huge either. So that’s a dead end, and dressing up like a seattle protester from 1999 and trying your best to act like one isn’t going to make you a successful winner of radical gains either.

These are all, intellectually, very liberating things. We’re not controlled by past ideologies, at least most of us who are thinking people are not. Re-inventing the wheel is bad, but far worse that than is being permanently hitched the the wagon of dogmatic adherence to ineffective political ideologies.

On a whole, I liked the article, and I think the author’s perspective is great. Let’s look at past movements, see what worked and see what didn’t. Lets repeat things we thought were good and try to avoid mistakes.

And most importantly, let’s not think just because we’ve read more about past movements that we are somehow going to be more correct, politically, on certain questions. “Theory is gray, green is the tree of life.” Life experience is always the best educator and former of political opinions. People seem to almost always form better opinions when they listen first, and speak second.

If you're interested in learning more about the populist movement, I highly recommend you read C Vann Woodward's book Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel. Other good books about the early Socialist Party which grew out of the remains of the Populists are Ira Kipnis' The American Socialist Movement and Ray Ginger's The Bending Cross

Permanent War or Peace Through Sustainability

2011-12-19T09:54:00.005-07:00

When the average American finds himself without food for three meals in a row, the ensuing chaos (riots, etc.) will make the United States a rather inhospitable place to be. Martial Law will immediately be declared, and the country will become a police state starvation camp. This can all be avoided, by the way, by shifting America away from an oil-based economy.

Here is a good article about Peak Oil written in 2007.

Here is a story about a town in Germany whose renewable energy systems generates 321% more electricity than the town itself needs.

Here is a fascinating story about the estimates of a Stanford professor who calculated what it would cost to shift America to a solar and wind energy system.

If you've never heard about "concentrated solar power" before, here is a great article about it on a popular, free, collectively edited internet encyclopedia.

Now, what few facts do we know about ME?

1) I work in a restaurant at a ski resort.

2) I slept in the truck last night up here because I was tired and I didn't want to drive home.

3) I live in a town of 850 people in the summer in almost total political isolation from mainstream America.

This means that there are restaurant workers sleeping in trucks at ski resorts who spend almost half of their year in total political isolation from any part of organized political life in America and some of them have better ideas, and more vision about how to create a sustainable long term future for our civilization than do any elected politicians from either of the two political parties.

Is that because people sleeping in trucks and working in restaurants are more intelligent than people with graduate degrees and years of paid political experience? Does it mean I, with google and a facebook news feed in lieu of any "Central Intelligence Agency" or "Federal Bureau of Investigation" have access to any kind of secret information that most people never hear about?

Hardly.

It does not take a whole lot of special knowledge or international networks of spies to learn about this stuff. You can go online and read for yourself.

So why isn't anyone in Washington talking about any of this?

It is because this is not a free and democratic country, and the people making decisions in Washington are doing as the representatives of short sighted oligarchy and nothing else. This is a country where rich people and rich corporations pay someone from their own ranks to represent their own interests. That is all they care about. Making money. Quite a lot of it has already been invested into oil and gas extraction, and politicians are bribed by legalized bribers called "lobbyists" to allow those invested interests to get the maximum possible profit- through of course destroying our environment and creating an unstable civilization that based on diminishing supplies of fossil fuels and increasing global war.

There is a GREAT LIE that renewables are bad because running an electric car off a solar / wind grid would cost more than running a car on gasoline. This is not the case! The true and "hidden" costs of oil are to be found in the tax-payer subsidized military industrial complex! Hundreds of billions of dollars a year pour from Congress into the Pentagon and from there into the coffers of the weapons makers. THAT is the source of our great budget deficits- not overpaid teachers, but overpaid war mongerers.

The cost of oil is something you will only come close to calculating when you factor in the costs of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan, and Palestinian dead. How do we quantify such a thing? Certainly, of course, not in war reparations! How much does it cost to afford medical care to a decade's worth of veterans with hundreds of thousands of PTSD cases and TBIs for the rest of their lives? How much does it cost to maintain over a thousand military bases?

Like the Wall Mart super profits supported by the nation's largest workforce being eligible for food stamps, the price of pumping gas (as intolerably high as it already is!) is deliberately concealed.

Now that I have exposed and defeated the economics of oil-war on its own terms, allow a moment to reflect upon the moral bankruptcy of that very proposition! How do you quantify a life? How do you estimate the moral cost to a country of its network of international torture chambers? Is a world of depleted uranium riddled deserts, littered with unexploded cluster bomblets, arbitrarily arrested citizens and monarchies kept in power by their US trained and supported sadists worth it?

And yet the wars still continue, troops and planes shifted from one country to another, half million dollar missiles are shot into peasant tents, creating terrorists far more effectively than they are destroying them.

In the 1930s we realized our agricultural and grazing policies were destroying the soils, creating dustbowls, ruining the range, and working rather well to ensure an increasingly limited future of wealth, job, and food production. At that time the mood for change among the citizens was high and this mood found its way into a political expression. Investments were made. New systems were experimented with. We changed how we did things, dropped bad habits, and adopted better ones.

Today there is no one left in that tradition of intelligent investment and planning in the Democratic Party. The Republican Party, of course, is even more out of touch, and will go to its grave on the eve of peak oil with a greater fear of homosexuals kissing than it will ever have of an energy crisis. The Military Industrial complex will not solve the problem of peak oil, though they are actively preparing to follow it to its conclusion by training our soldiers to oppress hungry citizens should domestic "order" fail.

An economic system whose planners and leaders predict their own collapse is system that has publicly confessed its own bankruptcy. Why should we listen to its pundits any longer?

We need a new political leadership in this country. It will come from neither of the established parties, to whom thinking people can only wish the speediest possible death. Let us throw off their oppression, and form a new party with the courage to re-invest in an actually sustainable future.

Global Warming and Positive Feedback Loops, in a nutshell

2011-12-15T21:31:00.004-07:00

My comment on a yahoo news article announcing

Russian scientists have discovered hundreds of plumes of methane gas, some 1,000 meters in diameter, bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean. Scientists are concerned that as the Arctic Shelf recedes, the unprecedented levels of gas released could greatly accelerate global climate change.

Read it!

This is human caused. What it is is the beginning of a positive feedback loop. A few centuries of burning coal, oil, and natural gas have raised temperatures slightly. What happens when you raise the temperatures slightly is that things like glaciers and Arctic tundra melt. Once they get going they take off and don't stop. Like rolling a snow ball off the top of a mountain, or triggering an avalanche with a pair of skis, the initial push does not take a great deal of effort. But gravity and the nature of snow will do the rest of the work for you, to build a large, fast moving and potentially dangerous accumulation in a little period of time.

A lot of methane is in the Arctic tundra and under the Arctic ocean. Usually it stays trapped there. But if you let enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to start melting ice caps and permafrost, a lot more methane goes into the atmosphere, and now your curve towards higher temperatures starts becoming sharper, closer to an exponential curve, and there's no way to turn it "off", even if we went to zero carbon emissions tomorrow.

The retreat of sea ice offers another example of a positive feed back loop. Solar heat hitting the ocean water gets absorbed. Solar heat hitting ice gets reflected back away from Earth. When you melt the ice caps, now a lot of ocean that used to be ice is water. So the oceans are absorbing heat faster and holding it longer than they used to, which of course results in more ice caps melting.

Need a third? How about the gulf stream? Do you know what the difference is between Central Russia and Philadelphia? Not a lot in terms of latitude. But the Gulf Stream brings warm water to much of the US Eastern Sea board and Europe and that keeps those places warmer. It is possible that the melting of the ice caps will change temperatures and salinity levels that will end the gulf stream. That would be a third huge positive feed back loop that once kicked off, would not be possible to shut off, and would change temperatures in those areas very dramatically.

The past billion and a half years of earth's history have seen widely changing global temperatures and sea levels. The only problem with that is that our species evolved to thrive around certain temperatures and certain times, and now has given up much of its mobility in exchange for infrastructure and a devotion to geographically fixed private property. Sure, as a species, we survived the last ice ages. And you know what? The ice ages sucked. It was really cold. A lot of people froze to death. You couldn't grow food and living off of mammoths got really old after a while. Especially after we ran out of mammoths.

Now start looking at the difference in hunter gatherer societies that were affected by the ice age and our society. We have mortgages. Cultivated farm land. Sea level cities. We have trillions of dollars invested into certain sea levels, rain and weather patterns, and our ability to feed ourselves depends on that. When you start changing global temperatures and wind and rain patterns all that goes out the window, and you can start thinking about refugee crises that make Hurricane Katrina or anti-Mexican racism and scapegoating today look like a symphony of brotherhood.

Still don't believe in Global warming? Sweet. I have ski resorts in Taos and Flagstaff to sell you.

New Party to Organize?

2011-12-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

Just heard about this thing, called the Justice Party, here.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 11, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On Monday, December 12, 2011 at 2:00 PM, a diverse group of courageous citizens will announce the formation the Justice Party, which is envisioned as a major new political party for decades to come. The Justice Party seeks governing authority at the local, state, Congressional and national levels, beginning in the 2012 election cycle. The Justice Party is being created as a new 21st -century political vehicle to allow all citizens to work together to bring innovative results-oriented, justice-based solutions to the political debate as soon as possible.

Rocky Anderson, the former Mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, will deliver an address explaining with the Justice Party is needed at this critical juncture in U.S. history to rapidly achieve economic, social, and environmental justice.

Might fizzle into nothing. Probably will. But there's a chance it might not. I hope it does accomplish something good, and in general we should see citizens' attempts to form independent and genuinely oppositional counter institutions to the bankrupt "Democrat" and "Repbulican" parties as good things.

In the discussion it was said, "we already have politicial partys socialist communist what more do we need?"

And as I responded,

--

The existing "socialist" and "communist" parties in the US are very small and generally irrelevant to most people. What a new mass party would represent would be an entrance of masses of people into the political arena in an attempt to fight for themselves politically. These same masses of people are not quite at the intellectual or ideological level of the previously organized "socialist" and other left groupings, for better and for worse. Sure they'll make mistakes and not have the "correct" politics. But that is how you learn, by trying. The best thing socialists and other radicals can do is to be part of those conversations with our learning, grappling people- and NOT to lecture them from the side lines about how right such and such a party has been all along and how it's time people adopt its unfamiliar dogma and obediently fall in line to recognize their patient saviors.

Let's see what happens

The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman

2011-11-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

I am republishing this wonderful article today from this site. Anyone who has been frustrated by recent experiences with consensus should read it!

The earliest version of this article was given as a talk at a conference called by the Southern Female Rights Union, held in Beulah, Mississippi in May 1970. It was written up for Notes from the Third Year (1971), but the editors did not use it. It was then submitted to several movement publications, but only one asked permission to publish it; others did so without permission. The first official place of publication was in Vol. 2, No. 1 of The Second Wave (1972). This early version in movement publications was authored by Joreen. Different versions were published in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 17, 1972-73, pp. 151-165, and Ms. magazine, July 1973, pp. 76-78, 86-89, authored by Jo Freeman. This piece spread all over the world. Numerous people have edited, reprinted, cut, and translated "Tyranny" for magazines, books and web sites, usually without the permission or knowledge of the author. The version below is a blend of the three cited here.

During the years in which the women's liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement. The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured society in which most of us found ourselves, and the inevitable control this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this overstructuredness.

The idea of "structurelessness," however, has moved from a healthy counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become an intrinsic and unquestioned part of women's liberation ideology. For the early development of the movement this did not much matter. It early defined its main goal, and its main method, as consciousness-raising, and the "structureless" rap group was an excellent means to this end. The looseness and informality of it encouraged participation in discussion, and its often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight. If nothing more concrete than personal insight ever resulted from these groups, that did not much matter, because their purpose did not really extend beyond this.

The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their tasks. Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of "structurelessness" without realizing the limitations of its uses. People would try to use the "structureless" group and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything but oppressive.

If the movement is to grow beyond these elementary stages of development, it will have to disabuse itself of some of its prejudices about organization and structure. There is nothing inherently bad about either of these. They can be and often are misused, but to reject them out of hand because they are misused is to deny ourselves the necessary tools to further development. We need to understand why "structurelessness" does not work.

FORMAL AND INFORMAL STRUCTURES

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.

This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. "Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not he used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites.

THE NATURE OF ELITISM

"Elitist" is probably the most abused word in the women's liberation movement. It is used as frequently, and for the same reasons, as "pinko" was used in the fifties. It is rarely used correctly. Within the movement it commonly refers to individuals, though the personal characteristics and activities of those to whom it is directed may differ widely: An individual, as an individual can never be an elitist, because the only proper application of the term "elite" is to groups. Any individual, regardless of how well-known that person may be, can never be an elite.
Correctly, an elite refers to a small group of people who have power over a larger group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent. A person becomes an elitist by being part of, or advocating the rule by, such a small group, whether or not that individual is well known or not known at all. Notoriety is not a definition of an elitist. The most insidious elites are usually run by people not known to the larger public at all. Intelligent elitists are usually smart enough not to allow themselves to become well known; when they become known, they are watched, and the mask over their power is no longer firmly lodged.

Elites are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together and deliberately try to take over a larger group for its own ends. Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any group and makes them so difficult to break.

These friendship groups function as networks of communication outside any regular channels for such communication that may have been set up by a group. If no channels are set up, they function as the only networks of communication. Because people are friends, because they usually share the same values and orientations, because they talk to each other socially and consult with each other when common decisions have to be made, the people involved in these networks have more power in the group than those who don't. And it is a rare group that does not establish some informal networks of communication through the friends that are made in it.
Some groups, depending on their size, may have more than one such informal communications network. Networks may even overlap. When only one such network exists, it is the elite of an otherwise Unstructured group, whether the participants in it want to be elitists or not. If it is the only such network in a Structured group it may or may not be an elite depending on its composition and the nature of the formal Structure. If there are two or more such networks of friends, they may compete for power within the group, thus forming factions, or one may deliberately opt out of the competition, leaving the other as the elite. In a Structured group, two or more such friendship networks usually compete with each other for formal power. This is often the healthiest situation, as the other members are in a position to arbitrate between the two competitors for power and thus to make demands on those to whom they give their temporary allegiance.
The inevitably elitist and exclusive nature of informal communication networks of friends is neither a new phenomenon characteristic of the women's movement nor a phenomenon new to women. Such informal relationships have excluded women for centuries from participating in integrated groups of which they were a part. In any profession or organization these networks have created the "locker room" mentality and the "old school" ties which have effectively prevented women as a group (as well as some men individually) from having equal access to the sources of power or social reward. Much of the energy of past women's movements has been directed to having the structures of decision-making and the selection processes formalized so that the exclusion of women could be confronted directly. As we well know, these efforts have not prevented the informal male-only networks from discriminating against women, but they have made it more difficult.

Because elites are informal does not mean they are invisible. At any small group meeting anyone with a sharp eye and an acute ear can tell who is influencing whom. The members of a friendship group will relate more to each other than to other people. They listen more attentively, and interrupt less; they repeat each other's points and give in amiably; they tend to ignore or grapple with the "outs" whose approval is not necessary for making a decision. But it is necessary for the "outs" to stay on good terms with the "ins." Of course the lines are not as sharp as I have drawn them. They are nuances of interaction, not prewritten scripts. But they are discernible, and they do have their effect. Once one knows with whom it is important to check before a decision is made, and whose approval is the stamp of acceptance, one knows who is running things.

Since movement groups have made no concrete decisions about who shall exercise power within them, many different criteria are used around the country. Most criteria are along the lines of traditional female characteristics. For instance, in the early days of the movement, marriage was usually a prerequisite for participation in the informal elite. As women have been traditionally taught, married women relate primarily to each other, and look upon single women as too threatening to have as close friends. In many cities, this criterion was further refined to include only those women married to New Left men. This standard had more than tradition behind it, however, because New Left men often had access to resources needed by the movement -- such as mailing lists, printing presses, contacts, and information -- and women were used to getting what they needed through men rather than independently. As the movement has charged through time, marriage has become a less universal criterion for effective participation, but all informal elites establish standards by which only women who possess certain material or personal characteristics may join. They frequently include: middle-class background (despite all the rhetoric about relating to the working class); being married; not being married but living with someone; being or pretending to be a lesbian; being between the ages of twenty and thirty; being college educated or at least having some college background; being "hip"; not being too "hip"; holding a certain political line or identification as a "radical"; having children or at least liking them; not having children; having certain "feminine" personality characteristics such as being "nice"; dressing right (whether in the traditional style or the antitraditional style); etc. There are also some characteristics which will almost always tag one as a "deviant" who should not be related to. They include: being too old; working full time, particularly if one is actively committed to a "career"; not being "nice"; and being avowedly single (i.e., neither actively heterosexual nor homosexual).
Other criteria could be included, but they all have common themes. The characteristics prerequisite for participating in the informal elites of the movement, and thus for exercising power, concern one's background, personality, or allocation of time. They do not include one's competence, dedication to feminism, talents, or potential contribution to the movement. The former are the criteria one usually uses in determining one's friends. The latter are what any movement or organization has to use if it is going to be politically effective.

The criteria of participation may differ from group to group, but the means of becoming a member of the informal elite if one meets those criteria art pretty much the same. The only main difference depends on whether one is in a group from the beginning, or joins it after it has begun. If involved from the beginning it is important to have as many of one's personal friends as possible also join. If no one knows anyone else very well, then one must deliberately form friendships with a select number and establish the informal interaction patterns crucial to the creation of an informal structure. Once the informal patterns are formed they act to maintain themselves, and one of the most successful tactics of maintenance is to continuously recruit new people who "fit in." One joins such an elite much the same way one pledges a sorority. If perceived as a potential addition, one is "rushed" by the members of the informal structure and eventually either dropped or initiated. If the sorority is not politically aware enough to actively engage in this process itself it can be started by the outsider pretty much the same way one joins any private club. Find a sponsor, i.e., pick some member of the elite who appears to be well respected within it, and actively cultivate that person's friendship. Eventually, she will most likely bring you into the inner circle.

All of these procedures take time. So if one works full time or has a similar major commitment, it is usually impossible to join simply because there are not enough hours left to go to all the meetings and cultivate the personal relationship necessary to have a voice in the decision-making. That is why formal structures of decision making are a boon to the overworked person. Having an established process for decision-making ensures that everyone can participate in it to some extent.
Although this dissection of the process of elite formation within small groups has been critical in perspective, it is not made in the belief that these informal structures are inevitably bad -- merely inevitable. All groups create informal structures as a result of interaction patterns among the members of the group. Such informal structures can do very useful things But only Unstructured groups are totally governed by them. When informal elites are combined with a myth of "structurelessness," there can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power. It becomes capricious.

This has two potentially negative consequences of which we should be aware. The first is that the informal structure of decision-making will be much like a sorority -- one in which people listen to others because they like them and not because they say significant things. As long as the movement does not do significant things this does not much matter. But if its development is not to be arrested at this preliminary stage, it will have to alter this trend. The second is that informal structures have no obligation to be responsible to the group at large. Their power was not given to them; it cannot be taken away. Their influence is not based on what they do for the group; therefore they cannot be directly influenced by the group. This does not necessarily make informal structures irresponsible. Those who are concerned with maintaining their influence will usually try to be responsible. The group simply cannot compel such responsibility; it is dependent on the interests of the elite.

THE "STAR" SYSTEM

The idea of "structurelessness" has created the "star" system. We live in a society which expects political groups to make decisions and to select people to articulate those decisions to the public at large. The press and the public do not know how to listen seriously to individual women as women; they want to know how the group feels. Only three techniques have ever been developed for establishing mass group opinion: the vote or referendum, the public opinion survey questionnaire, and the selection of group spokespeople at an appropriate meeting. The women's liberation movement has used none of these to communicate with the public. Neither the movement as a whole nor most of the multitudinous groups within it have established a means of explaining their position on various issues. But the public is conditioned to look for spokespeople.

While it has consciously not chosen spokespeople, the movement has thrown up many women who have caught the public eye for varying reasons. These women represent no particular group or established opinion; they know this and usually say so. But because there are no official spokespeople nor any decision-making body that the press can query when it wants to know the movement's position on a subject, these women are perceived as the spokespeople. Thus, whether they want to or not, whether the movement likes it or not, women of public note are put in the role of spokespeople by default.

This is one main source of the ire that is often felt toward the women who are labeled "stars." Because they were not selected by the women in the movement to represent the movement's views, they are resented when the press presumes that they speak for the movement. But as long as the movement does not select its own spokeswomen, such women will be placed in that role by the press and the public, regardless of their own desires.

This has several negative consequences for both the movement and the women labeled "stars." First, because the movement didn't put them in the role of spokesperson, the movement cannot remove them. The press put them there and only the press can choose not to listen. The press will continue to look to "stars" as spokeswomen as long as it has no official alternatives to go to for authoritative statements from the movement. The movement has no control in the selection of its representatives to the public as long as it believes that it should have no representatives at all. Second, women put in this position often find themselves viciously attacked by their sisters. This achieves nothing for the movement and is painfully destructive to the individuals involved. Such attacks only result in either the woman leaving the movement entirely-often bitterly alienated -- or in her ceasing to feel responsible to her "sisters." She may maintain some loyalty to the movement, vaguely defined, but she is no longer susceptible to pressures from other women in it. One cannot feel responsible to people who have been the source of such pain without being a masochist, and these women are usually too strong to bow to that kind of personal pressure. Thus the backlash to the "star" system in effect encourages the very kind of individualistic nonresponsibility that the movement condemns. By purging a sister as a "star," the movement loses whatever control it may have had over the person who then becomes free to commit all of the individualistic sins of which she has been accused.

POLITICAL IMPOTENCE

Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren't very good for getting things done. It is when people get tired of "just talking" and want to do something more that the groups flounder, unless they change the nature of their operation. Occasionally, the developed informal structure of the group coincides with an available need that the group can fill in such a way as to give the appearance that an Unstructured group "works." That is, the group has fortuitously developed precisely the kind of structure best suited for engaging in a particular project.

While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also rare and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions found in such a group;

1) It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity.

2) It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a "common language" for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn from the others' experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other's behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise.

3) There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily.

4) There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts.

While these conditions can occur serendipitously in small groups, this is not possible in large ones. Consequently, because the larger movement in most cities is as unstructured as individual rap groups, it is not too much more effective than the separate groups at specific tasks. The informal structure is rarely together enough or in touch enough with the people to be able to operate effectively. So the movement generates much motion and few results. Unfortunately, the consequences of all this motion are not as innocuous as the results' and their victim is the movement itself.

Some groups have formed themselves into local action projects if they do not involve many people and work on a small scale. But this form restricts movement activity to the local level; it cannot be done on the regional or national. Also, to function well the groups must usually pare themselves down to that informal group of friends who were running things in the first place. This excludes many women from participating. As long as the only way women can participate in the movement is through membership in a small group, the nongregarious are at a distinct disadvantage. As long as friendship groups are the main means of organizational activity, elitism becomes institutionalized.

For those groups which cannot find a local project to which to devote themselves, the mere act of staying together becomes the reason for their staying together. When a group has no specific task (and consciousness raising is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate others (though sometimes it is) as out of a lack of anything better to do with their talents. Able people with time on their hands and a need to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members in the group. Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as they are and to subsume personal dislikes for the sake of the larger goal. There are limits placed on the compulsion to remold every person in our image of what they should be.

The end of consciousness-raising leaves people with no place to go, and the lack of structure leaves them with no way of getting there. The women the movement either turn in on themselves and their sisters or seek other alternatives of action. There are few that are available. Some women just "do their own thing." This can lead to a great deal of individual creativity, much of which is useful for the movement, but it is not a viable alternative for most women and certainly does not foster a spirit of cooperative group effort. Other women drift out of the movement entirely because they don't want to develop an individual project and they have found no way of discovering, joining, or starting group projects that interest them.

Many turn to other political organizations to give them the kind of structured, effective activity that they have not been able to find in the women's movement. Those political organizations which see women's liberation as only one of many issues to which women should devote their time thus find the movement a vast recruiting ground for new members. There is no need for such organizations to "infiltrate" (though this is not precluded). The desire for meaningful political activity generated in women by their becoming part of the women's liberation movement is sufficient to make them eager to join other organizations when the movement itself provides no outlets for their new ideas and energies. Those women who join other political organizations while remaining within the women's liberation movement, or who join women's liberation while remaining in other political organizations, in turn become the framework for new informal structures. These friendship networks are based upon their common nonfeminist politics rather than the characteristics discussed earlier, but operate in much the same way. Because these women share common values, ideas, and political orientations, they too become informal, unplanned, unselected, unresponsible elites -- whether they intend to be so or not.

These new informal elites are often perceived as threats by the old informal elites previously developed within different movement groups. This is a correct perception. Such politically oriented networks are rarely willing to be merely "sororities" as many of the old ones were, and want to proselytize their political as well as their feminist ideas. This is only natural, but its implications for women's liberation have never been adequately discussed. The old elites are rarely willing to bring such differences of opinion out into the open because it would involve exposing the nature of the informal structure of the group.

Many of these informal elites have been hiding under the banner of "anti-elitism" and "structurelessness." To effectively counter the competition from another informal structure, they would have to become "public," and this possibility is fraught with many dangerous implications. Thus, to maintain its own power, it is easier to rationalize the exclusion of the members of the other informal structure by such means as "red-baiting," "reformist-baiting," "lesbian-baiting," or "straight-baiting." The only other alternative is to formally structure the group in such a way that the original power structure is institutionalized. This is not always possible. If the informal elites have been well structured and have exercised a fair amount of power in the past, such a task is feasible. These groups have a history of being somewhat politically effective in the past, as the tightness of the informal structure has proven an adequate substitute for a formal structure. Becoming Structured does not alter their operation much, though the institutionalization of the power structure does open it to formal challenge. It is those groups which are in greatest need of structure that are often least capable of creating it. Their informal structures have not been too well formed and adherence to the ideology of "structurelessness" makes them reluctant to change tactics. The more Unstructured a group is, the more lacking it is in informal structures, and the more it adheres to an ideology of "structurelessness,"' the more vulnerable it is to being taken over by a group of political comrades.
Since the movement at large is just as Unstructured as most of its constituent groups, it is similarly susceptible to indirect influence. But the phenomenon manifests itself differently. On a local level most groups can operate autonomously; but the only groups that can organize a national activity are nationally organized groups. Thus, it is often the Structured feminist organizations that provide national direction for feminist activities, and this direction is determined by the priorities of those organizations. Such groups as NOW, WEAL, and some leftist women's caucuses are simply the only organizations capable of mounting a national campaign. The multitude of Unstructured women's liberation groups can choose to support or not support the national campaigns, but are incapable of mounting their own. Thus their members become the troops under the leadership of the Structured organizations. The avowedly Unstructured groups have no way of drawing upon the movement's vast resources to support its priorities. It doesn't even have a way of deciding what they are.

The more unstructured a movement it, the less control it has over the directions in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages. This does not mean that its ideas do not spread. Given a certain amount of interest by the media and the appropriateness of social conditions, the ideas will still be diffused widely. But diffusion of ideas does not mean they are implemented; it only means they are talked about. Insofar as they can be applied individually they may be acted on; insofar as they require coordinated political power to be implemented, they will not be.

As long as the women's liberation movement stays dedicated to a form of organization which stresses small, inactive discussion groups among friends, the worst problems of Unstructuredness will not be felt. But this style of organization has its limits; it is politically inefficacious, exclusive, and discriminatory against those women who are not or cannot be tied into the friendship networks. Those who do not fit into what already exists because of class, race, occupation, education, parental or marital status, personality, etc., will inevitably be discouraged from trying to participate. Those who do fit in will develop vested interests in maintaining things as they are.

The informal groups' vested interests will be sustained by the informal structures which exist, and the movement will have no way of determining who shall exercise power within it. If the movement continues deliberately to not select who shall exercise power, it does not thereby abolish power. All it does is abdicate the right to demand that those who do exercise power and influence be responsible for it. If the movement continues to keep power as diffuse as possible because it knows it cannot demand responsibility from those who have it, it does prevent any group or person from totally dominating. But it simultaneously insures that the movement is as ineffective as possible. Some middle ground between domination and ineffectiveness can and must be found.

These problems are coming to a head at this time because the nature of the movement is necessarily changing. Consciousness-raising as the main function of the women's liberation movement is becoming obsolete. Due to the intense press publicity of the last two years and the numerous overground books and articles now being circulated, women's liberation has become a household word. Its issues are discussed and informal rap groups are formed by people who have no explicit connection with any movement group. The movement must go on to other tasks. It now needs to establish its priorities, articulate its goals, and pursue its objectives in a coordinated fashion. To do this it must get organized -- locally, regionally, and nationally.

PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURING

Once the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of "structurelessness," it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. But neither should we blindly reject them all. Some of the traditional techniques will prove useful, albeit not perfect; some will give us insights into what we should and should not do to obtain certain ends with minimal costs to the individuals in the movement. Mostly, we will have to experiment with different kinds of structuring and develop a variety of techniques to use for different situations. The Lot System is one such idea which has emerged from the movement. It is not applicable to all situations, but is useful in some. Other ideas for structuring are needed. But before we can proceed to experiment intelligently, we must accept the idea that there is nothing inherently bad about structure itself -- only its excess use.

While engaging in this trial-and-error process, there are some principles we can keep in mind that are essential to democratic structuring and are also politically effective:

1) Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures. Letting people assume jobs or tasks only by default means they are not dependably done. If people are selected to do a task, preferably after expressing an interest or willingness to do it, they have made a commitment which cannot so easily be ignored.

2) Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them. This is how the group has control over people in positions of authority. Individuals may exercise power, but it is the group that has ultimate say over how the power is exercised.

3) Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. This prevents monopoly of power and requires those in positions of authority to consult with many others in the process of exercising it. It also gives many people the opportunity to have responsibility for specific tasks and thereby to learn different skills.

4) Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person's "property" and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. Conversely, if tasks are rotated too frequently the individual does not have time to learn her job well and acquire the sense of satisfaction of doing a good job.

5) Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. Selecting someone for a position because they are liked by the group or giving them hard work because they are disliked serves neither the group nor the person in the long run. Ability, interest, and responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. People should be given an opportunity to learn skills they do not have, but this is best done through some sort of "apprenticeship" program rather than the "sink or swim" method. Having a responsibility one can't handle well is demoralizing. Conversely, being blacklisted from doing what one can do well does not encourage one to develop one's skills. Women have been punished for being competent throughout most of human history; the movement does not need to repeat this process.

6) Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible. Information is power. Access to information enhances one's power. When an informal network spreads new ideas and information among themselves outside the group, they are already engaged in the process of forming an opinion -- without the group participating. The more one knows about how things work and what is happening, the more politically effective one can be.

7) Equal access to resources needed by the group. This is not always perfectly possible, but should be striven for. A member who maintains a monopoly over a needed resource (like a printing press owned by a husband, or a darkroom) can unduly influence the use of that resource. Skills and information are also resources. Members' skills can be equitably available only when members are willing to teach what they know to others.

When these principles are applied, they insure that whatever structures are developed by different movement groups will be controlled by and responsible to the group. The group of people in positions of authority will be diffuse, flexible, open, and temporary. They will not be in such an easy position to institutionalize their power because ultimate decisions will be made by the group at large, The group will have the power to determine who shall exercise authority within it.

Eugene Victor Debs on "Sound" Tactics

2011-11-15T16:09:00.000-07:00

"Sound Socialist Tactics", by Eugene Debs, was written in Feb 1912 and was part of the Socialist Party USA's discussion period before their convention that year. It is well worth reading today.

You can read it as a PDF here, and I am also republishing it on this blog.

Sound Socialist Tactics
By Eugene V Debs

Published in The International Socialist Review [Chicago], v. 13, no. 8 (February 1913).

Socialists are practically all agreed as to the fundamental
principles of their movement. But as to tactics
there is wide variance among them. The matter of
sound tactics, equally with the matter of sound principles,
is of supreme importance. The disagreements
and dissensions among Socialists relate almost wholly
to tactics. The party splits which have occurred in the
past have been due to the same cause, and if the party
should ever divide again, which it is to be hoped it
will not, it will be on the rock of tactics.

Revolutionary tactics must harmonize with revolutionary
principles. We could better hope to succeed
with reactionary principles and revolutionary tactics
than with revolutionary principles and reactionary tactics.
The matter of tactical differences should be approached
with open mind and in the spirit of tolerance.

The freest discussion should be allowed. We have
every element in every shade of capitalist society in
our party, and we are in for a lively time at the very
best before we work out these differences and settle
down to a policy of united and constructive work for
Socialism instead of spending so much time and energy
lampooning one another.

In the matter of tactics we cannot be guided by
the precedents of other countries. We have to develop
our own and they must be adapted to the American
people and to American conditions. I am not sure that
I have the right idea about tactics; I am sure only that
I appreciate their importance, that I am open to correction,
and that I am ready to change whenever I find
myself wrong.

It seems to me there is too much rancor and too
little toleration among us in the discussion of our differences.
Too often the spirit of criticism is acrid and
hypercritical. Personal animosities are engendered, but
opinions remain unchanged. Let us waste as little as
possible of our militant spirit upon one another. We
shall need it all for our capitalist friends.
There has recently been some rather spirited discussion
about a paragraph which appears in the pamphlet
on Industrial Socialism, by William D. Haywood
and Frank Bohn. The paragraph follows:

"When the worker, either through experience or study
of Socialism, comes to know this truth, he acts accordingly.
He retains absolutely no respect for the property ‘rights’
of the profit-takers. He will use any weapon which will win
his fight. He knows that the present laws of property are
made by and for the capitalists. Therefore he does not
hesitate to break them."

The sentences which I have italicized provoked
the controversy.

We have here a matter of tactics upon which a
number of comrades of ability and prominence have
sharply disagreed. For my own part I believe the paragraph
to be entirely sound.

Certainly all Socialists, knowing how and to what
end capitalist property “rights” are established, must
hold such “rights” in contempt. In the Manifesto Marx
says: “The Communist (Socialist) revolution is the
most radical rupture with traditional property relations;
no wonder that its development involves the most radical
rupture with traditional ideas.”

As a revolutionist I can have no respect for capitalist
property laws, nor the least scruple about violating
them. I hold all such laws to have been enacted
through chicanery, fraud, and corruption, with the sole
end in view of dispossessing, robbing, and enslaving
the working class. But this does not imply that I propose
making an individual lawbreaker of myself and
butting my head against the stone wall of existing property
laws. That might be called force, but it would not
be that. It would be mere weakness and folly.
If I had the force to overthrow these despotic
laws I would use it without an instant’s hesitation or
delay, but I haven’t got it, and so I am law-abiding
under protest — not from scruple — and bide my
time.

Here let me say that for the same reason I am
opposed to sabotage and to “direct action.” I have not
a bit of use for the “propaganda of the deed.” These
are the tactics of anarchist individualists and not of
Socialist collectivists. They were developed by and
belong exclusively to our anarchist friends and accord
perfectly with their philosophy. These and similar
measures are reactionary, not revolutionary, and they
invariably have a demoralizing effect upon the following
of those who practice them. If I believed in the
doctrine of violence and destruction as party policy; if
I regarded the class struggle as guerrilla warfare, I would
join the anarchists and practice as well as preach such
tactics.

It is not because these tactics involve the use of
force that I am opposed to them, but because they do
not. The physical forcist is the victim of his own boomerang.
The blow he strikes reacts upon himself and
his followers. The force that implies power is utterly
lacking, and it can never be developed by such tactics.
The foolish and misguided, zealots and fanatics,
are quick to applaud and eager to employ such tactics,
and the result is usually hurtful to themselves and to
the cause they seek to advance.

There have been times in the past, and there are
countries today where the frenzied deed of a glorious
fanatic like old John Brown seems to have been inspired
by Jehovah himself, but I am now dealing with
the 20th Century and with the United States.
There may be, too, acute situations arising and
grave emergencies occurring, with perhaps life at stake,
when recourse to violence might be justified, but a
great body of organized workers, such as the Socialist
movement, cannot predicate its tactical procedure
upon such exceptional instances.

But my chief objection to all these measures is
that they do violence to the class psychology of the
workers and cannot be successfully inculcated as mass
doctrine. The very nature of these tactics adapts them
to guerrilla warfare, to the bomb planter, the midnight
assassin; and such warfare, in this country, at least, plays
directly into the hands of the enemy.

Such tactics appeal to stealth and suspicion, and
cannot make for solidarity. The very teaching of sneaking
and surreptitious practices has a demoralizing effect
and a tendency to place those who engage in them
in the category of “Black Hand” agents, dynamiters,
safe-blowers, holdup men, burglars, thieves, and pickpockets.
If sabotage and direct action, as I interpret them,
were incorporated in the tactics of the Socialist Party,
it would at once be the signal for all the agents provocateurs
and police spies in the country to join the party
and get busy. Every solitary one of them would be a
rabid “direct actionist,” and every one would safely
make his “getaway” and secure his reward, a la
McPartland, when anything was “pulled off ” by their
dupes, leaving them with their necks in the nooses.

With the sanctioning of sabotage and similar
practices the Socialist Party would stand responsible
for the deed of every spy or madman, the seeds of strife
would be subtly sown in the ranks, mutual suspicion
would be aroused, and the party would soon be torn
into warring factions to the despair of the betrayed
workers and the delight of their triumphant masters.
If sabotage or any other artifice of direct action
could be successfully employed, it would be wholly
unnecessary, as better results could be accomplished
without it. To the extent that the working class has
power based upon class-consciousness, force is unnecessary;
to the extent that power is lacking, force can
only result in harm.

I am opposed to any tactics which involve stealth,
secrecy, intrigue, and necessitate acts of individual violence
for their execution.

The work of the Socialist movement must all be
done out in the broad open light of day. Nothing can
be done by stealth that can be of any advantage to it in
this country.

The workers can be emancipated only by their
own collective will, the power inherent in themselves
as a class, and this collective will and conquering power
can only be the result of education, enlightenment and
self-imposed discipline.

Sound tactics are constructive, not destructive.
The collective reason of the workers repels the idea of
individual violence where they are free to assert themselves
by lawful and peaceable means.

The American workers are law-abiding and no
amount of sneering or derision will alter that fact.
Direct action will never appeal to any considerable
number of them while they have the ballot and the
right of industrial and political organization.

Its tactics alone have prevented the growth of
the Industrial Workers of the World. Its principles of
industrial unionism are sound, but its tactics are not.
Sabotage repels the American worker. He is ready for
the industrial union, but he is opposed to the “propaganda
of the deed,” and as long as the IWW adheres
to its present tactics and ignores political action, or
treats it with contempt by advising the workers to
“strike at the ballot box with an ax,” they will regard it
as an anarchist organization, and it will never be more
than a small fraction of the labor movement.

The sound education of the workers and their
thorough organization, both economic and political,
on the basis of the class struggle, must precede their
emancipation. Without such education and organization
they can make no substantial progress, and they
will be robbed of the fruits of any temporary victory
they may achieve, as they have been through all the
centuries of the past.

For one, I hope to see the Socialist Party place
itself squarely on record at the corning national convention
against sabotage and every other form of violence
and destructiveness suggested by what is known
as “direct action.”

It occurs to me that the Socialist Party ought to
have a standing committee on tactics. The art or science
of proletarian party tactics might well enlist the
serious consideration of our clearest thinkers and most
practical propagandists.

To return for a moment to the paragraph above
quoted from the pamphlet of Haywood and Bohn. I
agree with them that in their fight against capitalism
the workers have a right to use any weapon that will
help them to win. It should not be necessary to say
that this does not mean the blackjack, the dirk, the
lead-pipe or the sawed-off shotgun. The use of these
weapons does not help the workers to win, but to lose,
and it would be ridiculous to assume that they were in
the minds of the authors when they penned that paragraph.
The sentence as it reads is sound. It speaks for
itself and requires no apology. The workers will use
any weapon which will help them win their fight.
The most powerful and the all-sufficient weapons
are the industrial union and the Socialist Party,
and they are not going to commit suicide by discarding
these and resorting to the slingshot, the dagger
and the dynamite bomb.

Another matter of party concern is the treatment
of so-called “intellectuals” in the Socialist movement.
Why the term “intellectual” should be one of reproach
in the Socialist Party is hard to understand, and yet
there are many Socialists who sneer at a man of intellect
as if he were an interloper and out of place among
Socialists. For myself I am always glad to see a man of
brains, of intellect, join the movement. If he comes to
us in good faith he is a distinct acquisition and is entitled
to all the consideration due to any other comrade.

To punish a man for having brains is rather an
anomalous attitude for an educational movement. The
Socialist Party, above every other, should offer a premium
on brains, intellectual capacity, and attract to
itself all the mental forces that can be employed to
build up the Socialist movement, that it may fulfill its
emancipating mission.

Of course the Socialist movement is essentially
a working class movement, and I believe that as a rule
party officials and representatives, and candidates for
public office, should be chosen from the ranks of the
workers. The intellectuals in office should be the exceptions,
as they are in the rank and file.

There is sufficient ability among the workers for
all official demands, and if there is not, it should be
developed without further delay. It is their party, and
why should it not be officered and represented by
themselves?

An organization of intellectuals would not be
officered and represented by wage-earners; neither
should an organization of wage-earners be officered
by intellectuals.

There is plenty of useful work for the intellectuals
to do without holding office, and the more intellectual
they are the greater can their service be to the
movement. Lecturers, debaters, authors, writers, artists,
cartoonists, statisticians, etc., are in demand without
number, and the intellectuals can serve to far better
advantage in those capacities than in official positions.

I believe, too, in rotation in office. I confess to a
prejudice against officialism and a dread of bureaucracy.
I am a thorough believer in the rank and file,
and in ruling from the bottom up instead of being ruled
from the top down. The natural tendency of officials is
to become bosses. They come to imagine that they are
indispensable and unconsciously shape their acts to
keep themselves in office.

The officials of the Socialist Party should be its
servants, and all temptation to yield to the baleful influence
of officialism should be removed by constitutional
limitation of tenure.

There is a tendency in some states to keep the
list of locals a solemn secret. The sheep have got to be
protected against the wolves. No one must know what
locals there are, or who its officials, for fear they may
be corrupted by outside influences. This is an effective
method for herding sheep, but not a good way to raise
men. If the locals must be guarded against the wolves
on the outside, then some one is required to guard
them, and that some one is a boss, and it is the nature
of the boss to be jealous of outside influences.
If our locals and the members who compose
them need the protection of secrecy, they are lacking
in the essential revolutionary fiber which can be developed
only in the play of the elements surrounding
them, and with all the avenues of education and information,
and even of miseducation and misinformation,
wide open for their reception. They have got
to learn to distinguish between their friends and their
enemies and between what is wise and what is otherwise
and until the rank and file are so educated and
enlightened their weakness will sooner or later deliver
them as the prey of their enemies.

Still another matter about which there has been
not a little ill-natured discussion is the proposed investigation
of the Kerr publishing house. I cannot help
wondering what business the National Committee has
making such an investigation. It would be quite as
proper, in my opinion, to order an investigation of a
building and loan association in which members have
their savings invested.

It is true, without a doubt, that The International
Socialist Review has published articles with which many
of us disagreed, but why should it be investigated on
that account? Are we Socialists who are constantly protesting
against the suppression of free speech now going
to set an example of what we propose doing by
putting a gag on the lips of our own publications?
I don’t agree with a good deal that appears in the
Review, and I like it all the better on that account.
That is the reason, in fact, why I subscribe for it and
read it, and I cannot for the life of me understand why
any one would want to suppress it on that account.

If the Review and the concern which publishes
it belonged to the national party it would be different,
but it does not belong to the party, and the party is in
no wise responsible for it, and if I were a stockholder I
should regard the action of the national committee as
the sheerest impertinence and treat it accordingly.
I do not know if the house of Kerr & Co. needs
investigating or not. I am satisfied that it does not, but
it is none of my business.

The Kerr Company consists, as I understand it,
of some 1500 stockholders, nearly all of whom are
Socialists and none of whom, as far as I am advised,
are feebleminded and in need of a guardian. They have
paid in all the money, they own all the stock and they
are responsible for the concern; and if they want their
publishing business investigated that is their affair and
not the affair of the national committee of the Socialist
Party.

If the object aimed at is to punish Kerr & Co.
and cripple the Review for its advocacy of industrial
unionism and for opposing pure and simple craftism,
and for keeping open columns and exercising the right
of free speech, then it will be found in due time that
the uncalled-for investigation of the National Committee
and the uncomradely spirit which prompted it
will have produced the opposite effect.

I cannot close without appealing for both the
industrial and political solidarity of the workers.
I thoroughly believe in economic as well as political
organization, in the industrial union and in the
Socialist Party.

I am an industrial unionist because I am a Socialist
and a Socialist because I am an industrial unionist.
I believe in making every effort within our power
to promote industrial unionism among the workers
and to have them all united in one economic organization.
To accomplish this I would encourage industrial
independent organization, especially among the
millions who have not yet been organized at all, and I
would also encourage the “boring from within” for all
that can be accomplished by the industrial unionists
in the craft unions.

I would have the Socialist Party recognize the
historic necessity and inevitability of industrial unionism
and the industrial union reciprocally recognize the
Socialist Party, and so declare in the respective preambles
to their constitutions.

The Socialist Party cannot be neutral on the
union question. It is compelled to declare itself by the
logic of evolution, and as a revolutionary party it cannot
commit itself to the principles of reactionary unionism.
Not only must the Socialist Party declare itself in
favor of economic unionism, but the kind of unionism
which alone can complement the revolutionary
action of the workers on the political field.

I am opposed under all circumstances to any
party alliances or affiliations with reactionary trade
unions and to compromising tactics of every kind and
form, excepting alone in event of some extreme emergency.
While the “game of politics,” as it is understood
and as it is played under capitalist rules, is as repugnant
to me as it can possibly be to any one, I am a
thorough believer in political organization and political
action.

Political power is essential to the workers in their
struggle, and they can never emancipate themselves
without developing and exercising that power in the
interests of their class.

It is not merely in a perfunctory way that I ad-
vocate political action, but as one who has faith in
proletarian political power and in the efficacy of political
propaganda as an educational force in the Socialist
movement. I believe in a constructive political
program and in electing all the class-conscious workers
we can, especially as mayors, judges, sheriffs and as
members of the state legislatures and the national
Congress.

The party is now growing rapidly, and we are
meeting with some of the trials which are in store for
us and which will no doubt subject us to the severest
tests. We need to have these trials, which are simply
the fires in which we have to be tempered for the work
before us.

There will be all kinds of extremists to deal with,
but we have nothing to fear from them. Let them all
have their day. The great body of the comrades, the
rank and file, will not be misled by false teachings or
deflected from the true course.

We must put forth all our efforts to control our
swelling ranks by the use of wise tactics and to assimilate
the accessions to our membership by means of
sound education and party discipline.

The New Year has opened auspiciously for us,
and we have never been in such splendid condition on
the eve of a national campaign.

Let us all buckle on our armor and go forth determined
to make this year mark an epoch in the social
revolution of the United States.

Published by 1000 Flowers Publishing, Corvallis, OR, 2006. • Non-commercial reproduction permitted.

http://www.marxisthistory.org
Transcribed by Joseph B. DeNeen. Edited by Tim Davenport.

Lessons and Repression

2011-11-15T15:05:00.005-07:00

* “If a homeless man dies in Pioneer Park and there aren’t hippies around to blame… does SLCPD made a sound?”
~ Bob Aagard

If you haven't seen on the news, last weekend the Police kicked approximately 150 homeless people and political activists out of their tent city encampment in SLC's Pioneer Park. 19 were voluntarily arrested as they refused to leave in protest of the eviction. Several thousand dollars of donated camping gear were destroyed and thrown away by the police, scooped up by a large loader and placed inside of dump trucks. Much food, literature, and the kitchen were evacuated, but the camping gear wasn't and the retreat was generally conducted chaotically and in a highly personal manner.

Similar evictions have occurred at other occupations elsewhere. There's news stories about it you can read on news websites and I'll probably write about my personal experiences that day soon. But today, let's start a discussion about the political lessons of the movement.
-------------------

First, let's begin a review of movement literature and some political criticisms that I have been raising and contributing since the beginning of my involvement with Occupy SLC. The point is not to go over every argument here, but to provide you with an index of what they were.

The political document I am most proud of that this movement was able to produce before its repression was a newsletter that was produced as a project of the free school at Pioneer Park. It is online at http://occupyslcnewsletter.blogspot.com. The PDF version, which is what was actually printed out in 200 copies is online here.

It was edited together from 10pm-midnight the night before the eviction so that we could have something to give out the next day. It is about 50% interviews with people living at the park and the rest involves movement news and accounts by different activists. Jesse F, Michael W, Aharon, Justin, myself, Badger, Mearle, and three other people who are anonymous from the park all have contributions in it.

This is newsletter, of course, has been a completely separate project from my own blog, here. I got involved with Occupy SLC about a month ago when I came into town while I was looking for a winter job and housing. The park was a convenient thing to have because I was living in my truck and people in cities usually look at you weird for doing that. So I had a place to sleep and eat and cook while getting my act together and, as I also have a political background in social justice movements I was excited about the political movement as well.

I was, however, rather disturbed by the lack of long term planning or strategy, the lack of a clear articulation of demands or focus among the various fronts of the movement, and in particular a lack of accountability, definition of roles, or democratic structures in the movement. As a result, and as I am a writer, I began a series of blogs about the movement, most of which I also printed out with my own money and shared with people I had met at the park. Here they are in ascending order:

The Occupation of Wall Street (reposts of some a perspectives article by someone else and the demands of Occupy Wall Street.)
Sat Oct 15

Two Counteroffensives of the 1%: Middle Class, Will You Join Us?
(Arguments against the middle class prejudices attempting to be cultivated around the "53%" anti protest slogan) Wed Oct 26th

Political Perspectives for Broadening the Occupy SLC Movement (discussion and proposals for outreach, producing more educational materials, why it makes more sense to protest in the day rather than at night time)
Thurs Oct 27

We Took the Park, Now What?
(Arguments that bringing down plutocracy takes more than camping. We shouldn't fetishize a tactic. Proposals for homeless advocacy as a focus of pioneer park, generally acting more efficiently so as not to waste time, and a humorous critique of "leaderlessness" and the "consensus" model of decision making).
Sun Oct 30, 2011

Occupation in Danger
(Critiques of the "town hall" meetings as being undemocratically run, unclear in their purpose or structure, confusing to new activists, and inefficient. Frustrations and difficulties with the fact that the web site manager is out of touch and the site is not being updated. "How to Run a Meeting" Proposals for having the most basic structures of facilitators, time keepers, stack takers, and minutes takers at meetings. A very poignant prediction that "If you are very involved in some kind of political work but you are not trying to come up with a longer term plan and goal for the park, the whole occupation will stagnate around you and eventually crumble.")
Wed Nov 2nd

To Empower the 99%
(What are the resources and the campaigns of the movement and how can we make it work? I critique the proposed campaigns of "buying locally", using credit unions instead of major banks, and calling for a "general strike" with zero organized labor support and none of the infrastructure to run it as solutions that are not likely to produce the kinds of political, regulatory, and economic changes that are needed to actually empower "the 99%" and limit the control of the "1%". Arguements for more organization and for recognizing leadership and keeping it accountable rather than pretending it doesn't exist. Ends with a concrete proposal and political plan to turn pioneer park into a campaign to expand the inadequate shelter system. Sadly, the day this was written was the day the police announced they would be shutting down the park).
Friday Nov 11, 2011

Another blog that talks about the park and the movement is Deb's blog. I met Deb just as the park was being shut down. Here is her blog about after Eviction Day. Here is her blog about the eviction itself.

"The usual suspects say the campers (of which a large percentage are homeless) should go to the shelters in the community. What they seem to not understand is that the shelters are full. You also cannot get into the shelter if you do not have identification. Instead of identification, you can bring a utility bill or a credit card statement (if you’re so lucky to have had an address at one point or the luxury of a credit card). The media does not tell you that to get into these shelters, the homeless need to have their TB shots. Without healthcare, how is one supposed to keep up with luxuries like a TB shot? Homeless are also not allowed to bring anything with them into the shelter, so if they have a suitcase full of their prized possessions, they are expected to abandon it."

"We have been told the camp is undermining the services available to the homeless community. They don’t seem to understand that we, as Occupy, are trying to address the fundamental issue of how one becomes homeless in the first place...."

"...The reason why many resist the negotiations to come back daily yet not camp is that it is an attempt to hide the issue of homelessness. Asking us to come back everyday assumes that the population has somewhere else to go. We stand with the 99% and the homeless in Pioneer Park in addressing the fundamental flaws in our communities..."

* * *

Struggle moves forward. It takes different forms and creates different organizations and adopts new tactics and strategies in light of new experience. Let the struggle continue. And let the popular classes of the "99%" re-group and re-organize themselves for a new assault on the "1%". But let us not do so on the basis of the same disorganization and confusion that has hindered, rather than helped, our Occupying movement hitherto.

Ultimately, I believe the movement was repressed and is experiencing serious setbacks today as a result of its own inherent weaknesses. The spontaneity of it and the fact that anyone could get involved and start doing whatever they wanted did bring a lot of people together, but there was never a specific list of demands or focus for the work of the Pioneer Occupation. Neither was it professionally and sanitarily managed well enough (the kitchen passed the code, but there were feces and needles in some tents) to actually be a "winter long" homeless camp as many of the organizers there envisioned, even if we didn't have any deaths and we could have retained political 'goodwill' from the police. The nature of movements is that if they don't have a plan for how to move forward, and they stagnate, the power structure eventually comes up with a plan for how to repress them.

That is, of course, exactly what happened. It is almost surreal how completely oblivious most of the movement's leading activists were about the need for long term plans, strategy, and efficient, reliable structures up until the very moment they were looking repression in the face. Less than 18 hours before the police announced the park would be closed I interviewed a few leading activists who specifically told me they rejected the idea of listing specific demands, or even articulating a vision of what we could "win" as a victory before ending the occupation. One leading activist who was arrested at the park closure and was on the radio talking about it the next day told me a day and a half before his arrest that he was against us ever leaving the park "until the plutocracy was turned into a democracy". A term prospect indeed. Another activist, J___ who has been very active with the Federal Reserve Occupation, and whose interview was published in the newsletter, spoke glowingly and full of confidence in the police to me less than a day before the same police said they were shutting the park as well as the newly won Fed- Gallivan Occupation down!

I generally think that activists like myself or perhaps you who may also read politics and history a lot more than most people often run the risk of over estimating how effective literature can be in people's political education. I have always believe that most people don't form their political opinions on the basis of what things they read, but by the life they live. That is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is huge now in a way it wasn't- and couldn't have been- for the past 3 years. It took that long of living in a recession for people's ideologies and illusions in the system to be broken down by their own life experience to the point where they were willing to seriously consider, and be involved with, systemic critiques of the system.

We too, however, are people. And with regards to political education I agree with the statement that "Theory is gray, but green is the tree of life!". I hope we all will look long and hard at the successes, as well as the challenges, limitations, and recent repression of the Occupy SLC movement and in doing so identify our strengths and weaknesses, successes as well as mistakes.

Consensus-based decision making, the experiment of "leaderlessness", the fetishizing of one specific political (occupying) tactic, and the overall theories of actions and propaganda designed to spark "spontaneous" movements without strategic plans are all good places to start.

I will contribute to the assessment of these weaknesses in the coming days on this blog. I hope my discussion about these things digitally are being mirrored by similar discussions among occupiers and ex-occupiers far and wide.

To Empower The 99%

2011-11-11T15:58:00.004-07:00

A perspectives document on Occupy SLC
by Christian Wright

PT I: A POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE ON OCCUPY SLC

Where is Occupy SLC today? What do we have to work with? What could we do with ourselves?

Occupy SLC is moving along. A major recent victory was the gaining by the Fed Occupiers of a winning a space at Galavin Plaza, near 200 South between State and Main Streets, as an "educational front" in the center of the financial district. There we are able to directly protest the rule of the rich and powerful by bringing an anti-corporate message to large groups of people 24/7! Elsewhere, the "Town Hall" meetings which are held at "Room B" in the lower level of the library on Mondays and Thursdays from 7-9pm, and which involve much broader forces of "the 99%" who wish to challenge corporate power have in the past week gotten much better organized, efficient, and empowering. The focus of those meetings is to allow specific working groups to meet, communicate, plan and organize the actions, outreach, and messaging of the movement.

At Pioneer Park, organization and disorganization pose great challenges as well as opportunities. Last week a low point was reached when it snowed, several tents collapsed from the snow, and most crucially the kitchen was unable to cope with the weather. This was overcome by the energetic actions of several occupiers, including Jesse F, who quickly raised money online and drew up plans for the current, weatherproof design of the kitchen which is working well.

Yet, what we need is not just a better tarp or shelter here and there, what we need is a clarity of purpose and sense of direction. The park survives today, as much from luck as from anything else. Like a ship adrift at sea, no one is at the helm, half the sails aren't even out, and the anchor is dangling somewhere several meters below the surface. We are drifting along aimlessly among the currents, our maps and compasses and political signs have for weeks remained scattered about the floor of an abandoned room where they are periodically chewed up and stolen away for bedding by humble and self interested creatures while most of the crew has gotten into the rum and occupied the galley where they continue to be served by dutiful cooks themselves completely unaware whichever direction they are drifting in today, what time they will run out of provisions, or whether land and treasure or reefs and enemies are in sight, right behind us, dead ahead, or ominously close.

As I write this, I have just been informed there was a death today in the park. Other deaths, one a homicide and another an apparent suicide, have occurred at occupations in other cities. Camping in a park forever waiting to be evicted, run out of food, get snowed on or see people freeze to death is not a political program. It is not the answer to capitalism. It is not even a sane activity for anyone other than a completely desperate and actually homeless person to engage in.

I believe that ordinary people coming together and talking to one another can figure out the solution to just about anything. This method of discussion, thinking, honest collaboration, and the use of pens and paper has allowed us to do everything from inventing antibiotics to the construction of sewage and water systems to the abolition of legalized segregation and inter-planetary travel. I recommend, that instead of waking up, going about our day, and then going back to bed, that we begin a serious discussion that attempts to find a way forward for us all out of the cold and hunger and apathy and powerlessness and homelessness of our present condition.

---

PT II: WHAT ARE WE ACTUALLY DOING TO EMPOWER THE "99%" AND DIMINISH THE POWER AND CONTROL OVER SOCIETY OF THE "1%?"

Our movement has much potential, but most of our currently planned actions and events are (at the moment) completely Utopian. What are our events? We have education and propaganda, that is good. There are signs and fliers and there is Street Theatre. Perhaps that will "raise some consciousness", but again it avoids the question of direct struggle and material conditions. We have so much support because "consciousness" has already been painfully raised for most people by having their lives fall apart over the past 3 years of recession and greater than 10% real unemployment.

What we need is to challenge power directly and organize specific things that can win concrete improvements in the living standards of the 99%. In this article I will address the problems with several currently organized and proposed "actions", discuss a different way to view one's organizational potential, and offer a few concrete suggestions of my own.

Current active campaigns of the movement are as follows:

-To take money out of major banks and put it into credit unions.

-To protest shopping on "Black Friday" after Thanksgiving.

And, for good measure,

-to have a General Strike.

Let's look at these one at a time.

With regard to banks, I bank with Wells Fargo. I have not taken my money out of their bank and I have no plan to. But I know they are an evil institution. I was a fancy waiter in Denver in 2008 during the Democratic National Convention and I worked a party where banking lobbyists, including Wells Fargo, paid lots of money to the Democrats and bought for them king crab and raw oysters and expensive alcohol and chocolates with little pieces of flake silver and gold on top of it to eat. Yes. Gold and silver that is mined out of the earth in deadly mines and that is very precious. And they were eating it, during a recession. The heartless bastards. Later that fall, after business dropped down and I got laid off, I had bought $10 of $3 a gallon gasoline and a $1.50 coffee on a debit card. An old transaction had gone through unbeknownst to me and Wells Fargo inflicted upon me punitive overdraft fees totaling $70. This really bothered me and I think educated me very well about the inherent evilness of banks that bribe our politicians who look out for their interests, but who then punish their customers when they are caught up in the teeth of the recession.

To the credit of Wells Fargo, however, I spoke with a sympathetic banker and got the fees taken off. So there are humans there working at the branches after all. Yes. No human pushing papers around an office opening and closing accounts is an enemy of mine. The problem is at the top. And I realize the banks are evil. Though I appreciate the convenience of doing business with them. They have many convenient ATM and branch locations. I move around seasonally for work and work in different towns and states at the same time so it is a convenient bank for me to use. Sure they are an evil bank. But so is every bank.

I don't think taking my money in or out of any bank is going to accomplish any concrete changes. The social movements of the past in the 1930s and the 1960s that won things like unions, 8 hour working days, the weekend, health insurance, social security, unemployment insurance, that fought racism and segregation and expanded the right to vote and legalized abortion.... none of these things were won by people taking money out of one bank and putting it into another.

Credit Unions are not the solution. There will still be troops in Afghanistan and a $600 billion dollar pentagon budget and a $69 billion dollar military R&D budget compared to a paltry $6 billion dollar federal investment in alternative energy whether I use a credit union or a major convenient bank. There will still be a two party dictatorship masquerading as a democracy where ever I bank. They still won't let Ralph Nader or the libertarian or the green or any other candidate in the presidential debates. Immigrants will still be scapegoated for our problems and deported and abortion will still be unavailable in over 80% of counties in the United States. Where I bank will change none of this.

The problem here is much deeper than any one bank. Any one United States' president. Any one law or any one corporations' behavior. The problem, fundamentally, is one of POWER. An elite of super rich and corporate executives have too much. The great majority of the working and middle class have very little. Power, not hard work or luck or thrift or honesty, determines the appropriation of wealth in a capitalist society. It is not against Wells Fargo, or the Bank of America, or Chase , or General Motors, or the Democrats or the Republicans or Lockheed Martin or Boeing or the Pentagon that we have now been driven to revolt against. It is an entire system controlled by parasites and plunderers that is too abominably filthy to be cleansed by a single law, a single reform, or the abolition or even nationalization of a single corporation.

*

Another action proposed by the movement is that of refusing to shop, and attempting to discourage shoppers, from shopping at large stores on "Black Friday". Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving when many stores offer great deals. The anticipated crowds of Black Friday, and the ensuing holiday season offers inadequate though much needed and happily agreed to employment to many citizens. Of course these great deals are quite useful to poorer and working class folks. And you know what? I think poor and working class folks should be able to have things like clothes, blenders, washing machines, and TVs. Sure, most TV rots your brain. And FOX news is straight racist propaganda. But the Daily Show and the Colbert Report and South Park (all on "Comedy Central") are the best news programs on TV and people will get smarter and think more if they see them. Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel are super cool. So is National Geographic Explorer. And Cuddling up with a loved one to watch a movie is fucking awesome. Do you like cuddling up with a loved one and watching a movie? Of course you do. It is romantic and sweet to lie together under a warm blanket and drink something nice and eat popcorn and watch a movie. It could be a movie about anything. Just love or comedy, something lighthearted to allow you to escape for a few hours the soul-destroying horror of ordinary life. Or perhaps you might even watch something political and inspiring that motivates you to become a better revolutionary. Have you seen the movies "Malcolm X" or "Defiance" or "V for Vendetta" or "Land and Freedom"? Those are fucking awesome movies that will make someone way more inspired to take action to challenge the system than will, say, attending many of our movements' meetings!

It has been suggested that instead of shopping at the large stores we shop at local, smaller stores. Perhaps local and smaller stores do less harm, on average, than the giant capitalists. But it is the nature of capitalism that if we so succeed in patronizing small and local stores that they will only become large capitalists themselves one day, which is precisely the dream of every small businessman. And I do not fall for that marketing trick that "local" businesses are inherently better than "non local" businesses. In 2009 I worked at a small, "local" independent family run restaurant. They did not exploit as many workers as a larger corporate restaurant I worked at in 2007 did. But that is only because they weren't big enough to hire that many people yet. And they did exploit me! The owner illegally stole 20% of waiters' tips every day. He pretended it was going to the kitchen, but the kitchen never saw them and they were only paid an hourly wage. This small businessman was a fucking asshole who stole money from me and from nice, intelligent hard working 18 year old waitresses. He was a fucking parasite. And a "local" one. So a small businessman is not inherently better than a large businessman.

Giving money to some businesses instead of others in not going to change the systematic injustices of capitalism, the wealth inequalities, the closed nature of our political system, or end the wars or win investment in solar and wind power. As the working and middle classes, we don't have the money that the rich have. Our greatest strength is not with our pocket books. It is with our numbers. On the street, gathering together, defending our jobs and homes from foreclosure and outsourcing, and in the workplace and the school where we can occupy and go on strike and shut down the flow of profits to the top. That is where we are most powerful.

The "politics of shopping" ignore this, fail to recognize and take advantage of it, and ignore direct actions that could improve people's material conditions. The problem in a recession isn't that people are buying too many things or buying things from certain places instead of others. The problem is that people are broke and don't have a job and they can't buy things they need to survive. Like food. Or housing. Or a fucking TV to watch an awesome movie on and cuddle with a loved one to feel like a human being.

We need to fight for ourselves. Fight for our material interests. The wealth in society we have produced by our collective toil has been greatly concentrated in the pockets of the greedy and evil few. The people who work the hardest get hung out to dry and blamed for all the problems. The people who work the least and cheat the best get all the money. That needs to change in a big, big way. As a fellow revolutionary I would agree with Martin Luther King, Jr., that it is not just a question of providing a handout for a beggar, but of realizing that a system which produces beggars is an edifice in need of restructuring!

* * *

Are there other ideas? Other actions or campaigns? Yes, there is one! There is the idea of a General Strike! The fucking General Strike! In Salt Lake City, Utah in November 2011! Holy Fucking Shit Indeed! Has there ever been a General Strike in the entire history of the State of Utah? None come to mind, and I am a reasonably well informed person on matters of Utah State History! What is a General Strike? A General Strike is when everyone doesn't go to work, and they picket and march and elect people to a Strike Committee to run the strike and they make leaflets and daily newspapers and they are really really really really really well organized. What was a general strike? There was one in Seattle in 1919 when the working class ran the city for 5 days. There were big ones in Minneapolis and San Francisco in 1934. The was a huge, nation wide one in France in 1968. And who ran these strikes? Who called them? They were run by unions. Not the stagnant, bureaucratic declining shells of corruption like we have today. They were living, breathing unions led and run by an active, involved, radical and democratic membership. The active participation of Socialists and Communists was key to their well managed effectiveness and political leadership. Lessons we have forgotten today.

Today our movement is calling for a General Strike for a date later this month. And there is no labor support! Ahh, but I am told by a General Strike Organizer that "I talked to some people [in labor] and they were really excited". Wonderful, indeed!

Calling for a general strike when you have no unions and no organized working class support and no auxiliaries is completely meaningless. There will be no general strike. And yet one is called for. Called like a witch doctor speaking to invisible spirits, expecting to summon them from thin air! What is wrong here?

It is obvious. A great revolutionary in a revolution once suggested to an assembled crowd three basic principles for them to take into consideration. They were as follows, 1) Distrust the Bourgeoisie. 2) Control Your Leaders, and 3) Rely Only on Your Own Organized Strength.

And where are we today? We've got #1 pretty good. Though we've re-defined things from a scientific class analysis based on relations of humans to the way things are produced and owned to a vague, neo-populist analysis that focuses on wealth alone in a sweeping an abstract way: the "99%" verses the "1%". But the basic understanding is there. The super wealthy are the problem.

Then there's #2: Control Your Leaders. That is slightly less than halfway there. Most of our leaders pretend they are not leaders even though they are clearly leading in important areas of work. Behind the pseudo-radical semantics of us being a "leaderless" movements lies the reality of leaders who are unaccountable and uncontrolled. There in lies a tremendous danger. Elections, a great way to tie accountability and responsiveness to any important position (such as a newsletter editor, a website manager, a room facilitator, a minutes writer, an email list organizer, a permit holder, etc...) are usually ignored. At a few times when they are so obviously necessary to the basic functioning of the movement, such as a facilitator at a town hall meeting of 65 people, a facilitator is elected. Though it is not called an election. And instead of a clear and simple raise of hands to validate the authority of the elected facilitator a confusing "consensus" is taken that many people in the room do not participate in one way or another, nor do they understand. So we are still learning the most basic rules of leadership that every professional, political, and union organization in the world has spent the past few hundred years developing.

And #3? The last one? Ahh! This is the hardest, and the weakest. We do NOT rely on our own organized strength. We rely on phantoms and hopes. The same mistake many of us made with Obama- where we not only trusted a leader we didn't control, or even try to control, but we trusted a leader we couldn't control and we relied on his promises, rather than on what was organized, real, visible, and our own!

How the General Strike proposal exposes our great failure to appreciate this third point! Instead of being at the place, where perhaps we may be several years from now, where organized and unorganized workers are largely won to the idea of struggle and in communication with one another through official as well as informal horizontal networks; where the idea of a general strike might actually be possible, we are, instead... here. Today. In Salt Lake City in November 2011. Where we have nowhere near the organized strength necessary for a general strike. But does this stop the printing presses? No. It does not. The flyers are made and printed, "General Strike" proclaimed boldly on the front. And they are hung up. And instead of relying on our own organized strength we are relying on the vague HOPES (that no one, deep down actually believes in) that somehow, if we have a nice enough looking flyer, and we manage to put it up in enough places, that it will just *convince* several hundred thousand breadwinners in a recession to risk their jobs and put their families at risk to refuse to go to work and to come out to a demonstration called by people they've never met on behalf of a cause infamous for its chaotic leadership and its inability to coherently define itself!

So of course, there will be no general strike, and it will fail, and any union representative from a president to the lowliest shop steward or card holder looking at our flyer will laugh at the Utopian ultra-leftism of it. Such is the level of thinking currently leading the work of the Town Halls' events committee!

*

I will ask, then, what IS our own organized strength? What DO we have to work with? What CAN we realistically count on?

Look around Pioneer Park and see us for what we are! Talk to us and interview us and ask us questions! Get to know us, each other, ourselves! We are the people with good ideas and morals and intentions who are confounded in every election cycle by a pathetic choice between two heartless war mongering and out of touch elites bought and paid for by defense contractors, polluting energy companies, the pharmaceutical industry and the at-large super-rich. We are the ripped off unappreciated toilers who built the country only to then get thrown out on the scrap heap when the money changers on Wall Street pushed papers around wrong and fucked the economy up. We are the broken down, homeless, hated and scapegoated and made fun of and feared Salt Of The Fucking Earth. We are between jobs and caught up and addicted and degraded and alternately selfish and selfless because we have Traumatic Brain Injuries and personality disorders and a keen interest in personal survival. We are also activists and who are smart and skilled and who are probably spending a lot of our time worrying about and feeding and clothing and sheltering a lot of other people who probably don't give a damn about us or the cause. Yes. We are what society is, and what society needs, whether it knows it or not! We are the 99%, no doubt about that.

The crisis has arrived. Injustice, and the distribution of Power that makes this injustice possible, is clear to us all. And now we must deal with it, develop solutions and strategies and concrete campaigns. And we can't half ass it, or put our faith into illusionary forces. We can't rely on propaganda alone, and hope that the right call to action, or the right slogan, will bring everyone out to some great big jolly "fun" activity. Let us become more serious than that! Let us agree with the great Revolutionary, Thomas Paine, who famously said:

"When it becomes necessary to do a thing, the whole heart and soul should go into the measure, or not attempt it. That crisis was then arrived, and there remained no choice but to act with determined vigor, or not to act at all."

What we need is to challenge power directly and to organize specific actions and campaigns that can win concrete improvements in the living standards of the 99%. Victory is the best propaganda. People are busy and their time is important. They will rightfully distrust any persons or movements who seem to enjoy wasting time and working inefficiently. And what we need to inspire people today isn't hollow slogans on leaflets or the collapsing rhetorical masturbation of a directionless, unaccountable, inarticulate and "leaderless" inertia! THE AMOEBA IS BUT THE LOWEST FORM OF LIFE- it is not an organizational structure to be replicated by higher beings! Propulsion by any creature takes a great deal of division of labor among constituent parts, as well as coordination, accountability, and definition of roles. Let us abandon all empty talk and focus instead upon the original, radical idea, that revolution will not happen in a day, and that a protracted struggle on ideological, political, and economic fronts over months and years is necessary to build up the confidence, will, and organization among the popular classes that is absolutely a necessary perquisite for any political or economic restructuring of society from below.

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PT III: MY PROPOSAL FOR PIONEER PARK TO LOOK FROM TENT CITIES AND TOWARDS A PERMANENT SOLUTION TO HOMELESSNESS

Unlike most Occupations currently happening around the country, in our unique case, we have become predominately a park full of actually homeless people, and it is a minority of us who are out here for the purpose of making a political statement. I agree with Seth that this is perhaps a blessing in disguise, and provides us with an opportunity to organize support around a concrete campaign that could directly improve the material conditions of the people hardest hit by the recession, as well as politically attack and win ground against the currently dominant morality of selfishness, greed, and degradation of human life.

I propose that we should organize ourselves to a political campaign around the slogan "Housing is a right." We have through no intention or fault of our own managed to organize much of the city's homeless into a political movement that asserts housing and feeding oneself as a human right. We have dramatically demonstrated the need for comprehensive housing and the inadequacies of the current private shelter /charity and cash strapped governmental housing assistance programs by our tents that are set up in the park.

I propose that we consciously organize this into a movement to make housing a right. We have an incredibly wonderful strategic position to do this. The city would rather us disappear from the park. I as a homeless person would rather have shelter with a roof and central heating than I would freeze to death in tent in a park all winter. Most of the homeless people here feel the same way. Many people in the city politically support our message, that people should be placed over profits, and that housing should be provided for those who need it. And we've put a lot of embarrassing pressure on the city power structure as well as the deep pockets of the large financial institutions. We can use that pressure and this opportunity to win a better shelter and housing assistance program.

Also through no fault of our own, the highly visible presence of drug addiction in this park can be featured front and center in this movement to radically challenge the way drug addiction is treated in our society. Currently it is treated as a criminal problem. In reality it is a medical problem, and it is a moral crisis that we as a society have chosen to keep our drug addicts freezing outside in the street, rather than welcomed into the shelter of a secure and warm and humane treatment system. Asserting the right of housing and treatment for even the most disparaged, "hopeless", drug addicted and mentally ill people is not only a moral necessity, but it is a great political attack against the prison industrial complex. Millions of dollars are made building prisons and employing judges, lawyers, sheriffs, policemen, and prison guards to take non-violent drug users and turn them into felons who must unproductively be housed at great public expense in dehumanizing facilities where useful education is denied and an informal criminal education is abundantly accessible. This is a system that degrades human life. There is no other way to put it. And it is here that we could at best strike a great blow, and at worst at least cause a few cracks in the politics that hold it all together.

Therefore, my proposal is:

We, the residents of Pioneer Park, have hereby decided to constitute ourselves into a movement to abolish homelessness in the Salt Lake City area. We are directly abolishing homelessness by taking over a public park and using it to shelter and feed ourselves. This is a temporary solution, and in the interests of finding a permanent solution we hereby have set ourselves to advocate the following demands:

1) For funds to be made available, via grants and tax payer subsides, to improve the existing and inadequate shelter system as well as to construct new homeless shelters. New Shelters must be made ASAP and they must be well lit, well heated, handicapped accessible and conveniently located. They must be staffed by well paid and highly qualified social workers as well as by security guards who are able to ensure a violence and drug free environment for all seeking to escape street life. Wherever possible, every effort must be made to secure the dignity and the safety of all needing shelter by having private rooms available for families, couples, and individual citizens in need of shelter.

2) In addition to the construction of new family- friendly, drug and violence free shelters, we must acknowledge the special needs of other populations. For the safety and health of all citizens separate shelters should be constructed for mentally ill people who have special needs. Private institutions with documented and respectable experience in managing group homes for intellectually disabled people need to be invited to Salt Lake and involved in the solution to the housing crisis. Along with this, publicly managed institutions and systems must also be included as part of the solution.

3) A third category of drug addicted individuals also exists among the homeless population and everywhere in every shelter system has threatened and troubled the life of non-drug users seeking themselves a way out of homelessness. We recognize fact that people who are addicted to hard drugs are more likely to have their morals corroded by the vices of theft, violence, and unreliability. This does not change the fact that all those who are addicted to drugs are still human beings with lives that have value. Housing is a right for them as much as anyone else. Therefore, we propose a joint state- and private partnership to secure funding and management for a system of shelters and group homes for the drug addicted. While we believe the exact details of the management of such a place be left to experts with experience in this field, we propose the following suggestions:

-No one is arrested or put in jail for non-violent drug use.

-A needle exchange program is made available at all locations and drug treatment programs are made available. Free transport is also provided from each location to AA or NA type groups' meetings and back.

-Instead of being hoarded and stolen, theft and security is obtained by having institutional security supervise the keeping of residents' drugs in guarded, private on-site safe deposit boxes.

-Private, monitored rooms are made available for drug addicted individuals to do their drugs in. This reform is recognized as being safer for the individual as well as the general public than the current policy of forcing drug addicted individuals to seek public places to do drugs in.

-24/7 on site security is maintained and all violent persons are referred to city authorities for prosecution.

4) Upon the erection of a shelter system that safely, and with dignity, meets the needs of our city's homeless population, we will happily disband our occupation of Pioneer Park where we are currently with difficulty and discomfort housing ourselves within inferior system of shelter. This does not signify the end of our resolve to fight the abuses of the current power structure and priorities, but it will allow us to return the park to the city for other uses while we focus our energies productively and efficiently on other campaigns to reform other aspects of injustice in the Salt Lake City area.

At the moment, many of our "activists" feel that camping in a park forever without issuing any concrete demands or statement of purpose is going to somehow... be a good idea. I think these people are out of their fucking minds, and what they are most likely to do is to piss away a great opportunity to challenge corporate power, make lives better for people, and ultimately, they're going to get evicted and the kitchen will be torn down and the tents will be confiscated and the people who were relying on the protective cover of their movement to camp in the park are going to be out on their own once again scurrying about in an uncaring world of isolated homelessness.

The right to housing, and the act of providing love and care for all persons regardless of their position is a notion that has deep roots in many religions. Here in Utah, we can use this fact to gain support from many religious faiths.

As I political program of activity to win the above demands I propose:

1) We discuss this proposal with all homeless members of the Pioneer Park Occupation to see how they feel about it, and what level of involvement they would be able to contribute.

2) All of us educate ourselves as much as we can on the nature of the existing shelter system, and that we produce a document that lists its deficiencies. Also, we should educate ourselves on the struggles of places that have comprehensive and well functioning shelter systems and see what we can learn from them. These lessons can be added to the above document to produce a useful literature.

3) We hold a press conference at the Park announcing this campaign and these demands

4) We elect delegates we trust who are articulate and smart to meet with state legislature members to discuss our demands.

5) We empower the same delegates to meet with members of the most powerful financial institutions that we are currently protesting, especially if they have been bailed out by public funds, and we invite them to made charitable grants towards the construction of an improved SLC shelter system. Our movement has given them a political motive to participate in this. But obtaining their participation we would win a concrete victory for our own material relief, and in the process demonstrate the effectiveness of social movements to organize against the morality and power structures of capitalism.

6) We attempt to secure the broadest possible involvement in a public campaign of protests, at the park and at strategic targets, from homeless members of the park, homeless people not currently sleeping at the park, and any other political supporters.

New Blogs

2011-11-07T09:38:00.001-07:00

This blog has been interesting and good to have for the past several years.

But it is too convoluted. Theres political things, geological things, river things, ghost town things, personal things... it's too all over the place.

So I decided to seperate things out to give them their own focus and better organization. From now on, in addition to the already built promotional site for the ghost town project, I am running utahghosttowns.blogspot.com. The blogging format there will be a conveient one, not just to share photos with, but to begin the process of drafting articles that will later become chapters on the histories of some 40 - odd places all around the state.

As far as specifically river things and personal guiding life things go, I also started southeastutah.blogspot.com.

Both of those already have a few updates. As the winter approaches I should be having time to update them with many more.

What then, for laughing fish?

Maybe it'll become a more political blog. Can't see what else is left!

Occupation in Danger! Undemocratic meetings! An unaccountable Website! And How to Run A Meeting!

2011-11-02T13:46:00.006-06:00

Thoughts on the Movement by a Participant No 3: Nov 2, 2011
( Available as a PDF here).

Distrust the rich and powerful, control your own leaders, rely only on your own organized strength!

(this newsletter is written, edited, printed, and distributed with his own funds and on his own behalf by an anonymous citizen who is part of the occupy movement and who values accountability, transparency, and democracy).

Contents:

1.Undemocratic management of the Town Hall Meetings
2. The occupyslc.org website is not controlled by this movement
3. How to Run a meeting
4. The Park is really chaotic and as a result the occupation is in danger.

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1) The last town hall meeting that took place at 7pm November 1st at the Library was run completely undemocratically. The people who showed up never had a chance to be part of deciding what the agenda was, how long it was going to last, or who was going to be the facilitator.

I was invited to speak to a church's Sunday School last Sunday and I had a very productive time discussing the movement with the people gathered there. They generally supported the 99% message and several of them expressed an interest in getting involved and they gave me their emails. I told them about the town hall meeting and invited them to it. I don't think any of them made it out, which is fortunate, because I felt it was probably the least accessible, understandable, or democratically run meeting I have ever been to in my life.

If a meeting is started without any structure or organized roles in place, it is not going to be a productive meeting. At the town hall, people who were comfortable talking over others who had raised their hand up before them spoke to one another for one hour and 15 minutes. No time was allotted to discuss any specific topics. After hearing committee reports discussion wandered aimlessly. People who cared more about their own comments being heard than they did about listening to everyone's opinions dominated the evening. Many people who probably had good things to say or good questions to ask raised their hands and looked around confused. They often looked at the person who had been talking the most and who on their own initiative but with no democratic mandate had been “leading” the meeting. People hoping to be called on by this person were never called on.

This one person (that no one elected to anything!) effectively ran the meeting and talked as long as they wanted to during the first one hour and 15 minutes. At that point I was rather fed up with seeing people raise their hands and not get called on. I asked this person, who had herself done most of the talking and who started the meeting and was defacto leading it if she was indeed the facilitator. She said she was not. She said “no one” was running the meeting. Clearly, that was not working very well. In an effort to remedy the situation I then introduced a resolution to the floor for me to take stack for the next 10 minutes to go through people who had been raising their hands and hear their comments. The motion was seconded. And consensus was taken in favor of it.

I called on the first person who had had his hand up for a while and wrote down the next two people who also put their hands up on a speakers' list. At that point the aforementioned one person who had talked more than anyone else in the room for the previous 1 hour and 15 minutes interrupted that speaker and said “we didn't have time” to hear more people. She was asked to respect the stack and she had trouble doing this. As the last person who raised his hand was heard from she walked towards the back of the room and began talking to others who gathered around her about how upset she was with the fact that I tried to take a speakers' list. At this point the meeting broke out into working groups, which met, though there was not time for them to come back together and say what they discussed to the general body.

Was the shortage of time due to the fact that I had intervened to allow a few previously ignored people to be heard before we broke up into working groups, or was the shortage of time due to the fact that THERE HAD BEEN ABSOLUTELY NO STRUCTURE, AGENDA, OR TIME KEEPING FOR THE PREVIOUS ONE HOUR AND 20 MINUTES?

Our movement is plagued by many difficulties. We are plagued by people who show up to meetings and talk as long as they want . We are plagued by people who come to meetings and attack people who try and propose a useful, democratic structure for them. We are plagued by people who want to make decisions on behalf of an “occupying” movement who have themselves never occupied anything. I don't know if these are just people with poor social skills, or if they are actual enemies of the movement who have infiltrated it in order to disrupt it. It is pointless to accuse such a person of being either, because the the effect is the same. These people, unrestrained by democratic structures work to perpetuate the continued disempowerment of everyone present. And they will continue doing this just as long as structurelessness, disguised as “liberatory anarchism” is allowed to continue unchallenged.

IF YOU ARE PART OF THIS MOVEMENT AND YOU WANT IT TO SUCCEED YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO FIGHT THE “TYRANNY OF STRUCTURELESS” AND STAND UP FOR DEMOCRACY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND THE STRUCTURED FACILITATION OF MEETINGS.

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2) Those Occupying SLC today do not Control the website occupyslc.org

The people occupying Pioneer Park do not control it. The people occupying nothing but their apartments and their chairs but who do attend town hall meetings at the library in order to relate to “the movement” in some way also do not control it. Neither do the people occupying the Fed. WHO DOES CONTROL IT?

I don't know.

As it was discussed at the last town hall meeting, someone built the website, and then “got busy” with their personal life. So they have not been updating it. People with events to post on the calender and not been able to do so. I have not been able to post minutes from GA meetings that take place at Pioneer Park on it. We do not control our own public face! A new web team has assembled as a working group at the last town hall. They are planning to build a new site and get access to put it up. I asked how long they thought this would take. They said they don't know. I reminded them that many people who are sleeping out in the cold every night for several weeks very much ought to have prompt control over their own public face. I was criticized for phrasing things so “dramatically”. This is exactly why our “leaderless” movement will fail! We have no accountability! People volunteer for things and then flake out! People in positions of power, such as website mangers, are not elected! Under the name of “Anarchy” the same structures of power we say we oppose have been recreated!

Please come to the next town hall at the library this Thursday at 7pm if you are a serious person with web skills who can help us to remedy this situation.

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3) How to Run a Meeting

This is how you run a meeting. First, leave your ideology at the door. It doesn't matter whether you think “consensus” or “voting” is a better way of making decisions. It doesn't matter if you think “after capitalism” having “no leaders” would be nice. You have to look here at the crowd that is right in front of you right now. Think about how much time you have, what things need to be accomplished, and then start figuring out how the meeting can best be run to be efficient, to allow everyone to participate, to make sure malicious and disruptive people will not be able to hold up the meeting, and to make decisions in an orderly way.

First, get roles assigned. You will need to get people to volunteer and be approved by the group to be a facilitator, a time keeper, a stack taker, and a minutes taker.

A Facilitator is important. He or she is not a dictator, but they can at times jump in and say things. They are there to make sure we do not get off topic, that what should be a general discussion does not devolve into just two people talking to each other about specific details that could be worked out after the meeting. They keep an eye on the big picture, and if, say, people start trying to all talk about what someone just said as an announcement, they can remind the crowd, “Hey, this is just announcements right now. Please only raise your hand if you have an announcement. After announcements are all heard we will have general discussion.”

The Time Keeper is also important. Let's say the agenda of a meeting is a) 5 minutes for announcements, b) 15 minutes for committee report backs, b) 20 minutes for general discussion c) 30 minutes for working group break outs, and d) 15 minutes where working groups come back and report what they just discussed and introduce proposals to be voted on by the generally assembled people. A time keeper needs a watch and can give like a “5 minute warning” if we're running close on time. He can remind the facilitator when time is up for a specific topic.

The “Stack Taker” keeps a speakers' list. A speakers' list is sometimes called a “stack”. This person must be very observant and look around the whole circle or room often. If someone raises their hand, they write it down on a piece of paper. During the discussion they call on the people who raised their hand in order that their hands were raised. An exception to this is if one person keeps raising their hand and always seems to want to talk after every person talks. The stack taker should move this person to a lower place in the list and allow people who haven't spoken before yet to speak before them. A stack taker should be a different person from the facilitator. If a facilitator is so focused taking stack he will be distracted and forget to keep his eye on the bigger picture.

Lastly, have a responsible person be the Minutes Taker. This person writes down the essence of what was said, what announcements were made, what issues were discussed, what were the basic arguments of each side of a discussion, what proposals were introduced, and what decisions were made. In a democratic organization these minutes are shared with everyone who is part of the movement as soon as possible after the meeting. In a movement such as an occupation with limited internet access, minutes should be sent out online and also put on the website, but they must also be printed and distributed among everyone at the occupation.

Decisions in a meeting can be made in many ways. Sometimes decisions are never up for discussion or debate, they are just spoken of like they are already going to happen. That is an undemocratic way of making decisions. A better way is to allow voting, or if you absolutely must to use “consensus”- which I personally think is really confusing and redundant- but which some people who are part of this movement which is currently extremely disorganized, inefficient, unaccountable, and in danger of collapse seem to think is a better way to make decisions. I don't care how you make decisions. But whether you vote on stuff or use “consensus”, here is how it must work:

Number one, someone formally introduces a Proposal. Number 2, the proposal is not discussed or voted on unless it is seconded. You second a proposal by raising your hand and say “I second this proposal”. Then some time should be set aside for it to be discussed. NO OTHER DISCUSSION NOT RELATED TO THE PROPOSAL SHOULD OCCUR UNTIL THE PROPOSAL IS EITHER VOTED/ CONSENSED ON AND ADOPTED, OR UNTIL THE PROPOSAL IS REJECTED.

That is it. That is how you run a meeting. If you decided not to have a facilitator, and a stack taker, and a time keeper, people who love to hear themselves talk are going to talk the most, while people who like to hear what is said, think about it, and then maybe say something are not going to be heard at all. Any meeting with more than a small handful of people who already agree with each other on what they are there for and who are very respectful of each other, will require these basic structures. If you have a facilitator, a stack keeper, and a time keeper, you have a chance at having a democratic meeting. If you decide not to have these things, you WILL be condemning yourself to a “dictatorship of the loud and arrogant.” There is no middle ground. That is exactly how it is. And lastly, beware, for

PENS AND NOTEBOOKS ARE NEEDED FOR ACCOUNTABILITY. DISTRUST ANY MEETINGS WHERE THEY ARE CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT.

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4) The Park is Really Chaotic and the Occupation There is in Danger

The park is super chaotic. Someone named “Tank” who hung around for a while and decided to be park of the medical team stole Heathers' dog. It is a pregnant black and white pit bull. People still fight each other pretty frequently. We are organized enough to feed ourselves, and we finally got port a potties. Jesse is trying to organize donations better. Rob is trying to make the free school work better. Edward and Johnathan have done great work to get finances more organized and flyers finally printed and distributed. But there is still much to be done. Of all the people sleeping here, there is not enough energy or inspiration or self discipline to EVEN HOLD SIGNS UP ON THE STREET CORNER DURING RUSH HOUR. That is the ONE most basic thing we can do to share our message. I was at the park today and at 11:22 AM I took the tarp off the library/ lit table. That table is the one most basic political resource we have. It is where you go when you visit the park and where we have materials to share with visitors. And by 'nigh noon no one of all the people sleeping there had even bothered to take the tarp of it so the stuff there could be seen.

Most people staying at the park are more interested in personal survival and not freezing to death than they are in political protest and fighting the 1%. They are not helping with day to day organizing, but because of this the future of the park existing as a safe place for them to eat and sleep is not guaranteed. Most people “part of this movement” who say they are interested in fighting the 1% do not show up at the park, do not help us get things organized, and do not help create, print, and distribute political materials. The park is loosing its political focus. Our best activists are over extended and burning themselves out. We have no security, no control over our website, we do not write up and share minutes of the General Assemblies, and very few people camping here even bother to come to the General Assemblies. If we want the occupation to continue some behaviors need to change. If you are camping here and you like the fact that you have a place to not freeze to death you need to step up and help keep it clean and peaceful. If you are very involved in some kind of political work but you are not trying to come up with a longer term plan and goal for the park, the whole occupation will stagnate around you and eventually crumble.

We took the park. Now what?

2011-10-30T15:15:00.005-06:00

(photo, salt lake tribune)

Read about the eviction law firm that dresses up as homeless people for Halloween! Go here for a good Guardian UK article about the movement, and the police repression and agent provocateurs in Oakland. here is the very large occupy map. Here is an article the Salt Lake tribune just wrote on the Occupy SLC movement.

A PDF of my following comments is available here if you would like to print them out.

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Thoughts On The Movement By a Participant, # 2 Oct 20, 2011 6:20 pm

(Is this the last one of these I write? Maybe. If I get a job I'll keep it up and keep printing them if people say they like it).

It has been a busy month. We've got our movement up and running, and we are responding to our first instances of repression and political attack. What we have to do is figure out what the park is and what its plan is, as well as how to coordinate a broader movement. I am a seasonal worker currently living out my car trying to find housing and a job in the Salt Lake / Wasatch Front area. I am also very pissed off at the political system that keeps trying to destroy my life by laying me off and making me spend all my savings on gas money. I have a slum lord trying to screw up my credit years after he stole my security deposit in 2007 and I have a truck lease I am trying to pay off. I am very angry at the system and I have spent a lot of the past two weeks trying to fight it here at Occupy SLC.

I am glad Pioneer Park got occupied and held. It has provided me with a place to stay and cook and eat in safety without being chased around like a rat every time a light is shined on me. It's fed me sometimes. And it has allowed me to be part of making some political protest of my condition. So I like it. But where is it going? We have to figure out what the next step is. The following is my thoughts on the subject.

I believe the two things the movement needs to do are to try and figure out how to:

1) Remove power from the hands of the one percent and transfer it to "the people" as a whole.

2) Demand and fight for specific reforms that will ameliorate the effects of the humanitarian and economic disaster the decisions of the one percent have created among the unemployed, the working poor, and the declining middle classes.

How does that relate to Occupying a park? Where does that strategy fit in? This issue explores that.

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1.THE GOAL OF THE HOMELESS IS TO STOP BEING HOMELESS

(It is not to convince the entire working and middle classes of why they should be homeless too! The foreclosure banks, lawfirms, and the evicting sheriff's offices are doing enough of that already!)

What we at the park have done so far has been mostly to provide services of food and housing for the transient and unemployed and long term homeless. We've done this by taking direct action to turn a park into a "Grapes of Wrath" style tent colony of actually unemployed and homeless people. The park is that. In itself it is an act of defiance that radically asserts our humanity and the value of our lives and our rights to food and shelter.

We are that much more than we are just political activists who came to camp to make a statement. Most of the people who started doing this occupation for political reasons alone three weeks ago left because when they showed up they got scared of the drugs and attitudes of the long term homeless who live here. As they should have been. Because it is fucking scary. In America, as many people already knew and as many people more are finding out, when you are homeless, or semi homeless, suddenly the presence of drugs, drug users, and bad attitudes start to become part of your reality. They are there whether you like it or not. As long as there is a system like this one running things that does not value human life many people who are beaten down will choose to turn to drugs and the related petty crime out of despair and survival. That is just how it is. Those of us still here working at the park know this and we aren't afraid of it. We are here putting in a lot of time to keep the park working because we don't have a choice. This is the last refuge open to us and we are taking our stand.

Most of the people camping here are here because they need shelter. Not because they are choosing to come camping in the cold to make some kind of political statement.

We've come here and we are surviving. But is the goal to stay here forever? I think it isn't. No movement of the unemployed or homeless in the past has ever made the right to camp indefinitely in a public park through the cold winter a political demand. The political demands have always been for adequate housing, and “work or wages” as the unemployed often wrote on their signs in the 1930s.

The other day I made a great friend in the city who supports our “movement of the 99%” and who her self is living in a car, staying on friends' couches, and who has a job making $10 an hour but who with it cannot afford a place to live where she and her 6 kids could stay. What am I supposed to say to this person? Do I WANT her to stay in the park with her 6 kids? Hell no! I want her kids somewhere warm and safe! This is not a safe place for kids! Is this where you'd like your kids to be living? If your kids are here it is probably because you have no other choice but to take them here. That is fine and I will be part of doing what I can to work for you but surely, you'd prefer they be staying for the next 6 months of blizzards and sub-freezing temperatures somewhere with heating and running water!!

In the world I want to build, people freezing in a park all winter wouldn't happen. People would be housed. And today much housing stands vacant while people are thrown out into the cold! The speculators have built more homes than they can sell! They kicked us out of our houses to foreclose them and many of them sit idle. There is housing, and people need houses. This occupation is a temporary measure for me, because I am going to fight to find somewhere better to spend my winter because staying here and sleeping on my truck sucks! I will do that by trying to find a permanent place with water and electricity to park my small camper, or by finding someone with an extra room I can rent out cheap. If I have trouble with that I will be looking at every type of shelter and social service our overstretched social safety net can help me with. And short of that, I will perhaps be forced to occupy something else, like an abandoned building, as a squat. I won't stay in the park all winter because staying in a park when you are homeless sucks. I like the fact that I can stay here now, but it is a stop gap, emergency measure. I will fight along with all of you to be able to stay here as long as you can, but I believe, like intelligent animals that we are who recognize that indoor plumbing and central heating is preferable to winter camping, that our park should work together to make itself unnecessary. We should work to get ourselves into better places to live. We need to fight the system, take on the banks and politicians, form alternate political organizations, form unions at our jobs and schools and be willing to have sit ins and strikes and occupations of political and economic targets for the purposes of disrupting their operations. I can do that a lot more effectively when I can get a good nights' rest, when I can actually date or marry someone and have a place for us to live happily. When I am thus in a good mood. When I am warm and I can have both a refrigerator and a freezer to cook food that I want to cook, and not just a cooler that is a freezer and a fridge at different times in the same day. Having that stability would make me a lot more, sustainable and effective of an activist than I am in my present operation. Because right now I am more concerned about immediate survival than anything else.

So what operational conclusions do we draw from this? I believe our goal should be to quit being homeless as soon as possible. We could start trying to link individuals up with programs to move them into transitional and permanent housing. For those who remain and can not be helped by these programs, we could continue the occupation with THE SPECIFIC FOCUS of DEMANDING from the city adequate housing. We will never live adequately in tents with no security or heating in a park with heavy drug traffic. We could demand that the city locate an unused building that has central heating and running water and allows us to turn it into a permanent “transient” housing location. We could demand that they get a real kitchen that serves three square meals a day with city bought food and paid employees. That would be a really great thing for the city to have. There would be different locations to make it more manageable. That would put us into the property management business, and eventually the whole program could be turned over to professional paid management. We could also have that “office of transience” give loans or grants, which are paid directly to landlords, not to applicants, to get people into apartments

How to make something like that run, and how to deal with the questions of drug treatment, and how to made it fraud free, is hard. There could be “family” locations that have stricter tolerance for drugs. Maybe we could have specific places where people who are addicted to drugs could do them without freezing to death, but where they were monitored for their safety and kept away from families and non-users they might otherwise threaten. Bureaucrats and charities here and in other countries have been thinking about these issues for a long time. Their budgets are low and the “war on drugs” has perpetuated homelessness by treating addicts as worthless criminals, rather than as people's sons and daughters and fathers and mothers who have FOR WHATEVER REASON gotten involved with something nasty that they need HELP surviving through, and eventually leaving. There is a history of ideas and attempts to do this kind of stuff that we could look at. I see a movement for this as one potential direction for us to take. It would take a lot of work and research to focus on developing specific and workable proposals for. But it is something we should do. What do you think? Do you have better ideas? Tell me them!

Occupying is a tactic. But just occupying a park won't cure the ills of society. The revolution takes a lot more than good camping skills. Let's not “Fetishize a tactic”.

Coming together to help feed ourselves and secure for us housing via our direct action of taking the park was an important victory for us, and one that we are benefiting from. Figuring out our own next steps is difficult because we are half providing these direct food and shelter services, and half being part of making political statements, holding signs, etc. Though very few of us seeking shelter at the park are actually holding the signs! That itsself is because many of us at the park just there to survive, and we have a lot of personal issues and health problems we are dealing with that make “activism” difficult. I don't know what the next step or the right plan is either, but I look forward to working with all of you to figure it out.

"Occupying something" is a tactic, not a solution itself. And a lot of people are dreaming that the occupation itself will become the nucleus of a new society. Yet that conflicts with the most basic working class / unemployed needs and demands for housing, food, shelter, etc. The struggle isn't to get the single working mother of 6 to live in a sketchy park with her kids all winter. The struggle is to get her into a warm house with running water and a refrigerator. The park occupation is a stop gap temporary optional measure, albeit one with a political character. But the new society I want to live in is not one of people living in parks. It's people living in houses. And parks being nice places to hang out and enjoy during the day time, or maybe at night around Christmas with happy kids eating roasted chestnuts.

What we need To Solve The Bigger Problems is a broad, political movement that puts demands on the political system and wins the appropriation of resources for people who need them, rather than using our resources for bank bailouts, military contractors, etc. Where the self help direct action of taking over a park to have a place to live and cook ends, and the movement to fight for political demands begins, is a gray and fuzzy line. Different occupations have different character, different balances between unemployed and transient people needing a place to stay and activists camping as a political statement. So exact steps forward need to be figured out locally.

However, the danger is to limit ourselves to the occupying strategy, to *fetishizing* it as THE tactic to be done to "win". The power structure doesn't need to repress us like they did in Oakland. Eventually people will get tired and leave if they can, because it is getting colder out. And then the homeless and people living in their cars not as a political statement but because they have to will be left alone and on their own like they were before. So we can't pretend that just staying in a park is the one thing we are trying to get everyone in society to do. People camping in the winter in a snowy park with overworked toilets and little no personal space and burritos with no meat in them is not the society I want to live in. It's a product of the society I am trying to overthrow.

What we need is to take a hard look at reality. See exactly what we are, what we have, what we can do, and where we should be going. We can't just allow ourselves to be trapped into one tactic that many people have excitedly adopted, but which itself does not offer the ultimate solution of transforming our system into something more responsive and accountable.

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2. Things are disorganized and our best activists are suffering. It impossible to be an effective long term activist if you are always devoting your energy trying to keep a camp like this up and running. Working Groups are not optional. They are necessary. All of our leading activists are right now on the very edge of burning themselves out and disappearing because of overcommitment.

Right now I am tired. I don't get enough sleep or food because I go to a lot of meetings. And you know what ? A lot of those meetings are a waste of my time. People stay for 30 minutes, say some things, and then leave. People constantly interrupt each other. People come late to a meeting and start talking about whatever they want to talk about. It is rare in a meeting just to win an agenda. Every meeting that every business leadership and every political body in the world has starts with an agenda. And you know what? They get stuff DONE. The Pentagon gets stuff done with great efficiency. So does the G20 and the IMF. They get evil stuff done, but they get it done. Because they know how to run a meeting.

Several people at the last GA said they would do some things and then they did not do it. People voted to have a working meeting yesterday at 5pm and NONE of them showed up but me. A person from the last town hall said they'd email me a list of people who signed up to be part of a “street team” that they said they need and that I volunteered to help to organize. He never did. Then I emailed him about it and he never got back to me. N___ from the last town hall got all the emails of people interested in working on “outreach” together and said he would get us all in touch and have us become a committee. I've heard nothing from N___, and after I wrote him he never wrote me back either, though on Thursday he seemed very enthusiastic about taking on lots of responsibility! Someone else from the outreach working group of the town hall said they'd make a “general flyer”. A two sided one with very limited text, and which is twice as expensive to print than a one sided flyer, was brought to the march yesterday. But there is no link to it on the website.

I have better things to do with my time than to hang out with people who want to complain about the system, but who are themselves not interested in organizing themselves efficiently. This is very frustrating, especially when right now is such a key time for our movement.

We urgently need to develop better organization and sustainable routines that can make use of our many volunteers. I listed about just a FEW examples of dysfunction. Instead of coming together to FIX it, at the present time just a few people have put themselves forward to do the great majority of the work to pull the movement together and to organize the logistics of the occupied camps. They are substituting their own super-human efforts for the movement's collective inability to develop working structures. If they keep doing this they will burn themselves out, and they will disappear from the movement, leaving it to wither and collapse.

We must balance our involvement over the next week or two to a sustainable level.
For work to happen we must make our working groups serious things that are real and actually meet and don't waste time.

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3. A Light Hearted Story With Humorous Analogies About Leadership and the Limits of “Consensus”

Guess what? I don't believe in consensus! I believe in voting! I think it is FINE to have differences on what we believe because we all have differences on what we believe. I like when there are two ideas that each side argues its point, and then we all vote on what to do, and then we all do it, and then we assess it to see whether or not it was worth doing. 2/3s majority or simple majority. I don't care. But I think voting is a great way to made decisions. It's fine to argue your point and be outvoted. But it is childish to “block” a group's activity, or to say if they don't all agree with what you want, that you are going to pack up your toys and go home. That's manipulative and lame. I'd much rather be outvoted and obligated to try out something that the majority wants and I wasn't sure about, than I would prefer to “block” something.

I also think leadership is a real thing and it needs to be recognized! I am a leader because I have been showing up and writing flyers and printing them with my own money and I talked to passers by at the march on the 29th and I and gave out 100 flyers and I stood on the corner of 400 S and 300 W with signs at rush hour and I've been to the Fed and I wash my own and other people's dishes. Seth is a leader because he's been the “fire extinguisher” and chief organizer of camp doing things there is not enough space on this page to list. Alonso and Lionel are wonderful leaders who got a kitchen running and up to code from scratch. Jesse is leading our Internet and donations. That guy at the Fed is leading our presence at the Fed. The other Jesse is leading up having street theater actions. Leaders exist. You become a leader. You can just start being one. Leaders can be elected or recalled, which is great. If you rely on a “self selected leader” because you are afraid of organizational structure you may very quickly find yourself with a “self unselected leader” who feels he can step back as easily as he stepped up, leaving your movement hanging.

There is a very simple cure for the belief that consensus based decision making is “superior” to voting and electing people to do things, and that we can ignore the importance of people with experience, courage, initiative, and leadership skills acting in an official capacity where we all depend on them to lead. Here it is. I can get a raft and some paddles and a permit and I will drive any of you to the put it for Westwater Canyon of the Colorado River. I'll let you all try to take “consensus” on what direction to point your momentum when you're going over Funnel Falls, or when to start paddling when you're being pushed into a giant hole, a sheer wall of rock, or a whirlpool at Skull Rapid. One of you in the front can decide to stop paddling and “block” at the key moment in Sock-It-To-Me where you're being sucked and flipped on the Magnetic Wall. When all of you finally drown in the ensuing mayhem because you didn't want to elect an official captain to head up the “steering” working group of the raft, there will at long last be no one left to advocate the superiority of consensus.

(photo credit: Western River Expeditions)

Though I do not believe in consensus, I have been using it without complaint!. I facilitated the last GA at Pioneer Park and we made decisions via consensus. I am fine with that. I didn't try and ruffle feathers by putting in my own ideas of “voting” rather than “taking consensus”. Why is that? It is because I DON'T CARE how we make decisions. Getting work done is more important to me than fighting over how to do work. But do you know what bothers me? It is when people say they care about consensus, and they know all about this allegedly great new way to make decisions that is somehow better than the way decisions get made by every democratic country in the world, and then, after all that decision making gets made, THEY STILL DON'T DO WHAT THEY SAY THEY ARE GOING TO DO, AND THE NEXT DAY THEY DON'T SHOW UP WHERE THEY SAY THEY WERE GOING TO SHOW UP, AND THEY IGNORE MY EMAIL ASKING THEM WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED!

Serious, cooperative people can take any awkward decision making structure and make it work to accomplish what they need! Make decisions however you want! But I'll say this: what we are up against is the richest and most well armed ruling class in the history of the world. They spent the last three years showing us that they'd rather have us thrown out into the street when their speculation crashes the economy than they would have their tax dollars (money they didn't earn, but money that was stolen from the labor of heavily exploited people who work for them) go to pay for relief. If you want the “99%” of the population to take you seriously and join you, and if you want your occupations and movements to be sustainable, you are going to have to stop talking about what great things you are going to accomplish “being the change you want to see” and you are going to have to start showing up on time and doing the things you say you are going to do. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////Sincerely, - ME

Political Perspectives for Broadening the Occupy SLC Movement

2011-10-27T10:20:00.004-06:00

(sharing this here, perhaps some of the ideas might be helpful for people elsewhere?)

(Some political and organizational observations and suggestions for Occupy SLC by a participant.)

What has been accomplished at Pioneer Park has taken a lot of work and time and effort. It is a great testament to the skills and patience and dedication that have been pulled together in the face of strong political and logistical challenges. The character of Pioneer Park, and the balance between people who have come here to specifically be part of a political movement, and people who were already living here, has presented numerous challenges. Political activists in SLC have responded to this either by leading work at the park, or moving to the Federal Reserve building, or by withdrawing from active participation. A recent document written and shared online by a person who has been sleeping out at the Fed for along time revealed a great deal of frustration, and attacked the convictions of people who say they support this, or this kind of movement, but who have not joined that individual at the Fed in person, where he has been for many days, and where he got sick in the cold.

It was good for this person to write and express themselves but the tone of their article was not helpful. The people of the city did not come together and have a meeting and vote to elect that individual to take their stand. He is there entirely on his own behalf. It is not politically helpful to morally attack our closest allies because they have not chosen to make the major commitments to spend lots of time out in the cold that a few of us, without ever being asked to do it by our communities, have decided to do on our own.

The movement has recently been counter attacked by the forces of the 1%. Police broke up and evicted Occupations in Oakland and Atlanta. At the same time there have been articles written in the hostile press by journalists calling themselves “the 53%” who “work and pay taxes to support lazy bums”, to paraphrase. This is an attempt to draw away middle class support for the movement by appealing to their basest jealousies and prejudices. We need now at this time to come together, as I suggested in this article. We must look around, where we are, see what we have, and decide how we can turn it into a political fight back. The logistical challenges of establishing the park camp have diverted many activists' attention into running a soup kitchen operation, that while helpful and demonstrating good will and solidarity, is not in itself going to end corporate domination of our political system. A soup kitchen does not threaten the status quo. But ordinary people coming out of their confusion and apathy and talking to each other about what should be done, and how to do it, and where to start, just might.

MY PROPOSALS

1) J_ said we have middle class people with money who want to support us. I propose we use then and every cent we can get and put it into making this place look more political. If the Park is a political base, it needs to look more like one. The whole side of the road facing South 400, where most of the tents are, should be lined with signs. People driving by look at us. Let's give them something to look at. Let's not be off talking amounts ourselves unseen under a tree somewhere but let's always have people along the street here holding signs, smiling and waving. Let's put our own friendly, welcoming face on this movement. Also getting posters on the other sides of the park, and along cross walk entrances, would be helpful too. The street corners are most effective because then you can get seen by traffic going in both directions. Tents being erected do not by themselves politically challenge the people driving by. I propose we send a committee out to buy / obtain poster making materials, like poster board and markers, and we designate a time to make many posters. Let's keep those materials centralized in one place in the park, such as by the library area, so people can always come and make signs whenever they want.

2) I propose we strategically fortify the ongoing protest at the Fed Reserve. It may or may not make sense to sleep alone in the cold outside a government building at night when very few people are driving by. But whether individuals decide to sleep there at night or not, people who can make it there should prioritize being there at key times during the day. 7-10 AM ish, and 4:30 to 6 pm ish, are good because that gets commuter traffic. Targeting the volume of commuter traffic is the most efficient way to have the most people see our signs. Also there are more people on the street then, as well as around lunch hour (11:30 am to 2:30 pm). Lunch hour would be a great time to be there.

3) The Fed Reserve alone is not the problem. It is just one part of a very nasty set of financial and government entities run by nasty people. What other targets can we identify in the SLC area? Certain banks who played a major role in the crash? Anything else large and financial down town? Other federal buildings? If we had 3 people with signs during peak hours at 3 or 4 different locations, it would be way more visible to the city in general than just having one group of 9-12 people all standing at only one target.

4) We produce more educational materials to give to people who are passing by and want to learn more but who may not have the time to argue with us. We can reach many more people with leaflets in 15 minutes than we can just talking to one person for the same time! I wrote a generic “come join us” type leaflet that we can use. But if we are at a specific place we should have something prepared that is specific for that location. Why is the Fed Reserve so important? Let's put an articulate explanation on a quarter sheet flyer that is easy and quick and small and efficient to hand out. In addition to the specific info the occupy SLC website link could be on there as well as links to any news sites that might be helpful. When linking to news sites it would be best to list several sites, and not just only one or two that are heavily weighted towards a specific organization or ideology, which would incorrectly reflect the broad diversity of ideas and motivations our protest embraces. We can using our funding to print more leaflets at Kinkoes, or where ever else is cheap to photocopy.

5) Reach out to activists and draw them into the above practical work. Encourage them to make their own signs and stand on their own street corners if they cannot join us. We are not New York City. We do not have tens of thousands of people. But we do have many supporters who can't camp out, but who want to help stand up to the 1%. And there are many ways to stand up to the 1% besides just camping in a park! Having specific times to request their presence where their presence can be made the most of, even if someone can only show up once a week, turns the movement into something that can efficiently draw on the free time that our supporters do have.

This means call your friend who isn't here camping, and list the several times and places this week where there will be something they could really help out with for a hour, 2 hours, or so. If a few of us want to get together and get on the internet and go through everyone who likes / is part of the Occpy SLC facebook we could send them all an email / write on their walls telling them specific events they could come to. Another idea is to have a group of volunteers print out a lot of something like the come join us leaflet I wrote (or any other come join us leaflet anyone else wants to write!), and then make a list of all the places with bulliten boards in town. Then we divide that list and go hit up all those places. Colleges, Libraries, Gyms, Grocery Stores, and Coffee Shops are places to start. Where else can you think of? Would any of our small business friends like to display something like this in their store windows?

6) Let's plan and build specific political events that we can invite people to. How about we get two people who are each feeling strongly about either position debate whether the system must be overthrown, or can be reformed peacefully? Can someone write a very well researched factual talk on how exactly the crash happened (in of course easily understandable language), and what happened (or didn't happen) to the people who caused it? Or how about we turn all the chairs in a circle facing each other and we have one great big meeting, with a speakers' stack and moderator if enough people are there to need it, where we just debate politics and what we think should or could be done? These are just a few topic ideas, you of course have many more in your head! What can you think of?

We aren't at the point where we have the numbers and energy to have something like this every day, but we could maybe have it once or twice a week. This would be a great sort of event to invite more people to, and get them thinking politically. And also on this point, we must recognize that most people work in the day, and by the time most people are off work and free the park is dark and cold. So let's have a public meeting on something like this, say, 7pmish on a weeknight, and have it in a rented (free?) room. If we could get a room at a college we could build it big among the college students. Lights and heat would certainly improve the atmosphere!

There are many ways to resist the system.We must not take any one method or location and fetishize it into “the” tactic that is “the” solution. It will take more than people camped out in parks or on sidewalks to bring down the world's most powerful, well armed, and entrenched oligarchy. Every action we take right now, and probably always, should be guided by the question of, “What is the best way to put us into contact with the greatest numbers of people?”

How and where we can have the most effective political presence? How can we most effectively get people talking and thinking about these issues? And once people's minds are tuned into the idea of resistance, how can we plan our actions in a way that everyone, whatever their level of availability, can in some way participate in? Someone who can stand on the corner with us for two hours, and then go home and go all through their next week telling everyone they knew what it was like to take a stand and be having the conversations we are having, is worth a whole heck of a lot more than someone by themselves spending 8 hours at night sleeping on a deserted street anywhere!

Always ask, “what is the next step?”, “How can we turn more people into activists?”. Because the minute we stop trying to grow and reach out is the minute our movement starts to stagnate. As the 99%, our greatest weapon is our numbers.

The next Occupy SLC general assembly will be tomorrow, Friday at 6pm. Then again there will be one Sunday at 4pm. I warmly invite ALL FORCES to attend the meeting Friday.

Two Counteroffensives of the 1%! Middle Class, will you join us?

2011-10-26T11:33:00.006-06:00

Some habits are hard to break

(above photo, Oakland CA, October 2011)

"If we are going to talk about personal responsibility let's talk about the personal responsibilities of the speculators. Or the SEC. Or the war mongers who spent all the money invading Iraq and Afghanistan, so that now there's a deficit that didn't exist in 2000. That is the real reason the government is short of money, but no one wants to talk about that. No one's talking about the personal responsibility of George Bush or Alan Greenspan. No one's talking about the personal responsibility of the bankers."

The super rich are scared by a condition that they are unaccustomed to. It is the condition of the people whose lives they have destroyed standing up to them.

The police have been unleashed. The same police that never arrested the speculators, that led George Bush walk free despite the mass murder on his hands, are now cracking down on the people brave enough to denounce the crimes that have affected us all.

A campaign is underfoot, at the behest of Wal Street, to encourage the jealousies, fears, contempt, and narrow minded self centered selfishness of middle classes, and to turn them against the protests, easing their conscience while repression continues.

The Middle Class is split and will split. As it always has and always will. There are two ways to define the "middle class". The way that is most often used is by income. So we include the image of what autoworkers used to get paid and office workers and small store owners and professionals in the same category. Another way to look at is is by job. What is your relationship to the "means of production"? Are you part of management or labor (usually both)? Whose do you instinctively side with- the workers grumbling about conditions and the inadequacies of their management, or the managers grumbling about the flaws of their workers? It's important to look at class as defined by your relation to ownership and control, not just your income. Whether you generally find yourself controlling, or controlled by, other people does a lot to affect your psychology.

If you own a small restaurant, you may work in it yourself, but also exploit your workers. I used to work in that restaurant, as a worker. Whenever today I hear about how we need to "shop local" I think of the local restaurant who illegally stole my and my coworkers' tips. Just because someone also "works" for a living, and is "local", does not mean he is not also an exploiter. He is a small boss but he wants to become a big boss. Because he owns the place and manages it his outlook is often more instinctively closer to that of larger capitalists.

At other times, perhaps his outlook may change. The economy is bad and he doesn't think small business get enough support. Maybe things will eventually get so bad he will sympathize with the workers he used to take advantage of, and support legislation and movements aimed to improve the condition of working people. At other times, he'll side with the politics of big business to "reduce taxes", even though what he gets from that is minuscule compared to the millions the large companies actually get with such reductions. He's perpetually afraid of both sides, yet identifying with both sides, though never fully able to identify with either. He tends to be mentally stressed, if not unstable, in his political psychology. He can either be an ally or an enemy of working class movements. He may switch from one side to the other in the course of these movements.

Like many other people who have never been elected to office or on TV, I have been actively talking about the wealth polarization in this society for years. The data is there. It is real. It has always been real. But it took the recession to break down people's ideologies and illusions with their own life experience. That is how most people form their opinions, by what they live, not just what they read. So here's the data from this article about exactly that.

(The blue bars representing the 1% are the only ones that have gone up).

The great majority of the middle class has seen its living standards decline over the past decade. This might mean getting laid off from one's professional job. It might mean scaling back one's lifestyle because the cost of gasoline is so high. It might mean having to shell more out to put your kids through college that you had prepared to, or watching them take on tremendous debt just to get an education that 30 years ago was much, much cheaper.

In other ways, the decline of the middle class has been much more grim. Homes have been lost. Jobs have been increasingly outsourced for years, doing far more to lumpenize the American working class than any defect of "culture" that racists disparaging inner city communities are often so quick to attack. The middle and former middle class has endured again and again the destruction of their unions and the disapperance of high paying jobs only to then be lectured with economists' statements about "restructuring" and the need for the country to stay "competitive".

Throughout all this two things have rarely been said. Number one: "sacrifice" over the past 30 years of restructuring is uneven. Workers get laid off, not just so the boss can keep being a boss, but so the boss can make much, much more money moving the factory to Asia. The second is that it is always the bosses and never the workers making these decisions. That's as true at the workplace as it is in politics, where the system is controlled by people with money. For anyone to win an election they must first convince large sections of the wealthy that they will represent their interests. Not "special interests", but large corporations and rich individuals is where most of the money for politicians' campaigns comes from. Even if you live in Iowa and New Hampshire when the primaries start, the only reason you get to hear about anyone being in a primary is because they've already raised enough money from wealthy donors to enter the race at that early stage. Routinely, the Republicans and Democrats both get substantial funding from the same companies.

Like a festering sore, living standards have declined for decades while the super rich's government of the super rich allowed the super rich's standard of living to rise dramatically. There was grumbling. There was a brief moment in Seattle in 2000 when it looked like something might actually be done about it... but for naught. This movement was attacked and destroyed by a wave of jingoism after September 11th 2001. The military quagmire abroad was mirrored by the swamp of a similarly irresolute, disassociated, unsatisfied, alienated and demoralized decade known to history as The Bush Years.

What broke the stagnation was the collapse in 2008. There was no immediate fightback, as many hoped there would be. Most of those hardest effected pulled back to the shadows of personal survival. Political organizations and citizens were distracted by the theatrics of Obama's "Hope and Change". The people have endured, far more than they should have ever have been asked to endure. And they were never asked. Unemployment doubled in just a few months. No immigrants to blame for that. It was the whitest and most native born people in America who "took our jobs".

Many held their breath and looked to Obama as a savoir. They gave him time and the benefit of the doubt for three years, over which time Obama's devotion to Wal Street had time enough to come out. The most progressive of his campaign pledges were quickly scuttled, while the more modest reform that he did propose (his health care plan was designed to benefit the private insurance industry at least as much, if not more, than sick people) was instantly mired in the mud of congressional inaction. First, this was with a Democratic Congress that was unable to advance the Democratic Party's Agenda. By the next election enraged rich and white America had elected enough of the older cronies back into power that the presidents' chances of accomplishing anything at all were ever more dimmed.

Today the people are gathering. In angry, though extremely peaceful crowds. Nowhere have I seen guillotines, or pikes, or torches, though I might have reasonably expected them to be relevant. No. Instead what they have are cardboard signs and sleeping bags. And they are feeding each other. In the city's Parks! Clearly it is well past high time for reaction to send in its batons and its tear gas, to save the nation from this menace!

Along with the more thuggish aspects of repression is an ideological offensive to split the middle class from the movement. Resurrected from its grave and thrown back frantically into circulation are 60s era criticisms of protesters as "bums", bums who have only themselves to blame, for blaming the world they found themselves living in where they have not taken enough "personal responsibility". Benevolently if not desperately, the articles are now being curned out and flung far and wide towards middle class readers. Flung, perhaps not unlike a colonial Englishmans' coins tossed out to a crowd of poor brown beggars!The better perhaps, to keep them beggars, and to keep the from evolving into something else. Something far more difficult to placate. Yes. The spectre of personal responsibility has come back from its grave, quite fittingly just in time for Halloween.

So I left my comments.

"I had a very nice job in 2008 that I worked hard, studied, learned, and got on my own merit and pluck. I always handled and budgeted my money well, as well as money I handled for a living. Then some super rich people I've never met a thousand miles away did things with other people's money, and now I'm out of a job. Well I will not take responsibility for that!"

"If we are going to talk about personal responsibility let's talk about the personal responsibilities of the speculators. Or the SEC. Or the war mongers who spent all the money invading Iraq and Afghanistan, so that now there's a deficit that didn't exist in 2000. That is the real reason the government is short of money, but no one wants to talk about that. No one's talking about the personal responsibility of George Bush or Alan Greenspan. No one's talking about the personal responsibility of the bankers. If I robbed something small from a store I'd go to jail. The bankers have robbed our homes and jobs and wiped out millions of people's life savings. Why doesn't anyone talk about personal responsibility for them?"

There are other things out there at go bump in the night which are far more terrifying than the personal responsibility of the corporations and politicians under whom we toil. I am sure there must be. But for some reason I'm having a hard time right now thinking about just what it might be.

We get slurs for everyone these days. Mexicans are "illegals" who take our jobs. Muslims and Arabs are "terrorists" who need to be bombed into democracy- even while they struggle and die today to free themselves from the Ben Ali and Mubarak and Saudi and Jordanian dictatorships we've imposed on them. And the people in the park, the people with the signs, the revolution. Yes. It's "people who don't feel they need to work or people who feel they are entitled to something they haven't earned." Says the article. Parroting off in manipulated contempt the words written for them by the press of the richest one percent!

As a representative of myself and my generation of of protesters I am of course happy to extend my hand, and sit down with, and discuss with any member of the middle or any other class, that the unemployed people in the park holding signs demanding jobs are not people who "don't feel they need to work." They are people who are desperate for work. And millions of us have been desperate for it since 2008. Many more since before then.

The people who live in America, and have worked in America, and who clean the streets and wash the toilets and cook the food and teach the kids and deliver the mail and keep the lights on around here in America, we are not "people who feel entitled to something they haven't earned." We made this country the richest country in the world and the people who sit in offices pushing money in and out of accounts and creating complex derivative schemes and selling them to each other have created nothing of value for this world.

Responsibility is important. The one place it has been a problem for far too long is that we have abdicated our political responsibilities as citizens. We've let the rich get away with running our government, and our economy, for far too long. We haven't been looking out. We haven't been making decisions. We haven't been exerting our power. And no one has been more guilty of this than the American middle class! Convinced that if we just hold our nose to the grindstone and work, work, work, we'll be rewarded. Millions of us chose and choose to consciously ignore politics as some strange, confusing thing other people do that we don't want to have to worry about. And so we left it in the hands of the worst kind of people, and it has been used for the worst ends, and it has been be ignored just so long as we could pretend that didn't affect us. Well we can't pretend that anymore. And I think that if you're part of the 99% you'll agree with me.

Americans are hard working people. We work ourselves to death. We work ourselves into our 80s instead of retiring. We work ourselves for decades to pay off our debt for eduction or health care. Education, health care, jobs, a roof, warmth, and food, such seditious "entitlements" we are demanding today. For it is a characteristic but of the most barbarous stages of our species' development that any of these should be a considered privilege, to be held as the possession of the wealthy alone, to whom all the rest of the peasantry might gaze up with wonder.

Today we are the richest country in the world. We have incredible technological capacities, educational infrastructure, hospitals, and- most perversely- empty houses standing alone while families huddle under tents to seek shelter from the elements!!

This could be a really nice place to live. Not just for the rich- hiding in seclusion behind fences- but for everyone. The question the occupation is raising today is whether we are going to decide to live up to that potential. It is the richest 1% that is the target here. I don't need anyone in the 53% to pay taxes to keep me on welfare. I'd much rather have my own job, and I think all of us would. Maybe a job like the ones the activities of the 1% had formerly stolen from us.

Middle class, how responsible are you going to be? Will you join us?

The Horror House

2011-10-22T16:27:00.002-06:00

At the end of the road there is a Horror House

It's past the Mosquito Swamp

If you cross the old bridge over the river.

Past the hills where the bones are buried

The boards are gray

And the decour is out of season

You'll find it

The mummy of a ghost horse.

It's curtains

At the Horror House

The Occupation of Wall Street

2011-10-15T12:50:00.002-06:00

This seems like a pretty good idea, and one that is long overdue.

Yes it is incipient, and learning, and imperfect, but so are you! It is good to see this starting and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

Some stuff...

This is the NY General Assembly's Website. Here is their initial declaration / list of grievances. I reprinted it below, but first, I will reprint Pham Binh's article from The Indypendent.

------------------------------

The 99 Percent Occupy Wall Street

By Pham Binh

http://www.indypendent.org/2011/10/05/ninety-nine-percent-occupiers/

The entrapment and arrest of 700 peaceful Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activists on the Brooklyn Bridge has created a huge wave of support for their movement. The number of daytime occupants in Liberty Plaza doubled or tripled from 100 the week prior to 200-300 this past Monday and Tuesday. These people are the core who maintain the occupation of the plaza, making it possible for several hundreds and sometimes thousands to hold rallies in the late afternoon and participate in the open mic speakouts andGeneral Assembly meetings in the evening.

The mood of the crowd is defiant and determined. Quite a few people were still unsure of how exactly they had been trapped by the NYPD, but that did not matter.

What mattered was that OWS made front page news in papers around the world along with its official list of grievances, undercutting naysayers who pretended it was a bunch of ignorant jobless kids without a clue as to what they want.

What mattered was that Transit Workers Union Local 100 backed up Friday’s solidarity speeches with action by filing an injunction against the city for ordering their drivers to bus arrested protesters to jail. The drivers cooperated with the orders, but only because armed high-ranking NYPD officers told them to do so. Who can blame the drivers? You never know which one of them might be the next Anthony Bologna.

On Tuesday, a brave soul named Steve from the 1 percent came to talk to the people in the park. He claimed to work for a nearby investment firm, and he certainly dressed, spoke, and acted the part. Many of the activists questioned him and tried to debate him, but he gave them mostly suave evasions, which generated a lot of frustration among the crowd of 5-10 that gathered around him.

A white Viet Nam veteran and hospice nurse (I never saw an old woman with a purple heart until today) asked Steve why should Medicare or Social Security be privatized using a voucher system? Why should the elderly and sick be forced to do with less during these hard times? Steve replied that he does not support these moves and believed in a “strong social safety net” (a direct quote). Next, a middle-aged black guy named Keith Thomas (who later turned out to be a transit worker injured on the job) asked Steve whether or not Wall Street firms had any type of moral obligation to their employees. (Thomas was laid off from a Wall Street firm prior to his job in the transit system.) Steve agreed they have a moral obligation, but added that no entity, whether it was a corporation or government, had obligations that were set in stone.

When I heard this, I could not keep my mouth shut anymore and interjected, “so what about Medicare and Social Security? Those are obligations, right? And you said you supported them.” I pointed out that “too big to fail” banks enjoy a government guarantee that they would get bailed out again as in 2008. Not surprisingly, Steve did not take well to my line of questioning and left shortly there after. The crowd thanked him for having the dialogue, as did I, and we asked him to come again.

I doubt he will.

In the course of the exchange, a number of things became clear.

First, Wall Street and Corporate America will try to deflect responsibility for what OWS is upset about in the hopes that it falls for the Tea Party mantra that “government is the problem.” When Steve said we should be protesting in Washington, D.C., demonstrators said Wall Street owns the government; some even went so far to say that Wall Street is the government.

Second, OWS has become what can only be described as a people’s movement. When you go into the park, it really is the 99% that you find there. Thomas later told me he felt like this was “just like 1968.” He said it evoked feelings in him he had not felt for a long time.

There is a feeling of empowerment, like justice is on our side, of good will, and of seriousness of purpose in the air there that is very difficult to capture with mere words. Even pictures and video footage, worth many millions of words, cannot convey it.

You have to come to Liberty Park to experience it. And once you experience it, you cannot stop the inner urge you feel to fight and win, against all odds. It is this feeling that is propelling the movement into the most unlikely of places, like Mobile, Alabama.

I am not old enough to remember 1968, but I imagine this is what it was like.

The occupation in the last few days has become much more multiracial than in the first and second weeks. I saw aging Viet Nam veterans (some of them homeless), union workers, high schoolers, journalists from the corporate media, Laura Flanders, Michael Moore, Hispanic and African immigrants, low-wage workers who work nearby, retirees, disabled people, and college students.

The class and racial breakdown of the occupants looks much more like that of a rush hour subway car in midtown Manhattan than an alternative music concert as it did previously.

If you hear otherwise, you are hearing lies.

The only people missing are the the Steves of the city, the 1%. They are asking their friends in the corporate media, “is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal? … Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”

Wall Street is worried about what this means.

And they are right to be. We are onto them.

The occupy movement is growing roots into all communities among all age groups and races. Everyone is bringing their issue to the table and receiving nothing but 100% support. There is not a progressive cause OWS will not get behind, nor an injustice that it will not try to address in some way.

Union members from New York City’s largest municipal workers union, DC37, held a rally at OWS on Monday, as did the Teamsters who have been locked out by 1% auction dealer Sotheby’s for months. There were quite a few members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) there as well (their headquarters is two blocks away).

All of the middle-aged union members I saw were grinning from ear to ear, cheered by the defiant and militant spirit that was once the calling card of the American labor movement. Speaking of which, I ran into a young man at the Monday occupation who said he was a descendant of the Molly Maguires. I never expected to hear that name at a protest in this day and age (they were framed and executed in the 1870s using the same methods the state of Georgia used to kill Troy Davis because they sought to organize Irish immigrant workers in Pennsylvania’s coal fields).

This young man, Mark Purcell, traveled from central Pennsylvania to OWS and said he planned to get involved in whatever occupation happens in Philadelphia. Mark told me he realized the system was totally corrupt when he worked at an Allentown warehouse as a temporary worker. He said the companies took advantage of undocumented immigrants since they have no legal rights or protections. The minute he complained about working conditions, the company he worked for told him to talk to the temp agency that was technically his employer, and the temp agency fired him. He was pissed that companies outsource labor to these agencies and use that to dodge responsibility for working conditions. “It’s bullshit,” he said.

Amen.

The spirit of the Molly Maguires lives on at OWS. On October 5, National Nurses United, 1199SEIU, SEIU Local 32BJ, the New York AFL-CIO, UFT, Communications Workers, Professional Staff Congress-CUNY, the NY Central Labor Council are all mobilizing to rally and march to join OWS. And they have permits.

In addition to the alphabet soup of unions mobilizing, student activists are organizing walkouts from Hunter College, the New School (where professors issued a statement supporting their students’ walkout), and even New York University. Even the children of the 1% support OWS.

The last time the unions mobilized was back in May, when the UFT brought out over 10,000 during its contract negotiations with Mayor Bloomberg. The proceedings were tightly controlled and the messages carefully managed from above by union leaders.

This time, things will be different. The turnout will surprise everyone, and the message will not be handed down to the city’s workers and students from on high. “Students and labor can shut the city down,” we shouted at Friday’s rallies against police brutality.

Perhaps we were prescient.

----------------------------------

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on september 29, 2011

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

-------------------------------

This is also good,

NYCGA Good Neighbor Policy

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Jake
Reply
Following respectful and good-faith dialogue with members of the local community which has been rebuilding since the trauma of 9/11, Occupy Wall Street hereby announces the following Good Neighbor Policy:

OWS has zero tolerance for drugs or alcohol anywhere in Liberty Plaza;

Zero tolerance for violence or verbal abuse towards anyone;

Zero tolerance for abuse of personal or public property.

OWS will limit drumming on the site to 2 hours per day, between the hours of 11am and 5pm only.

OWS encourages all participants to respect health and sanitary regulations, and will direct all participants to respectfully utilize appropriate off-site sanitary facilities.

OWS will display signage and have community relations and security monitors in Liberty Plaza, in order to ensure awareness of and respect for our guidelines and Good Neighbor Policy.

OWS will at all times have a community relations representative on-site, to monitor and respond to community concerns and complaints.

Occupy Wall Street
October 13, 2011

Note: In conjunction with local community members and their representatives, OWS is also working to establish off-site sanitary facilities such as port-a-potties.
Posted in News, Official General Assembly news |

Fall in Sevier County

2011-10-04T15:30:00.003-06:00

Went out to Clarion, just West of Centerfield. It may have been a ghost town once. I am not sure. But today it hardly fits... though you could take the right photos and pretend it was once. But I found it, camped out, built the tarp as a big lightning and rain storm provided a welcome upon my return, at long last, to The Great Basin.

Camped out off this road. Picture here about 6:50 am.

Got the picture of the old house:

Old house on a ranch

But Clarion is not a ghost town. Clarion may have once been this isolated ruin worth considering for Ghost Town status. But the agriculture and ranches of the Sevier River Valley have spread East and West. And from where the above picture was taken you could hear the cows mooing from the large ranch behind the structure. It's not really ghostly. The irrigated alfalfa field providing the scenic backdrop is a realization of the prosperity and potential that, in its own time, eluded the settlement.

But the pictures were worth taking, and will probably be use in the introduction for an example of the controversies surround what to include, and what not to include, as a ghost town. And I'll say, there are so many scattered, abandoned ranch buildings out here besides this one, one could easily spend a week between Centerfield and Salina just taking all their pictures... in those 2.5 hours of sunlight a day that are appropriate for picture taking.

On to Kimberly, Mt. Belknap, the high plateaus... Tonight it will be chilly at 10,000 feet! Trying to get the high places all in before the snows come.

And before that it was the La Sals... Miners' Basin. We wandered around all day looking for the cabins, found an old Gold Mine. Then found out they were a lot closer to the road than we thought. The next day got the pictures. Even then a storm was threatening. Intermittent rain. That whole area may be covered with snow in a week.

If all goes well the snow gods will allow me another Month, possibly two, in this wonderful, low elevation land of warm evenings.

Coal Country

2011-09-17T15:32:00.004-06:00

Been spending the week in Emery- Carbon County. Mostly examining old coal camps, going for better pictures than I had time to take last year.

Spent the last four days in Spring Canyon. It rained every day. Which is unusual, because this is supposed to the be the high desert where it rarely rains. But it's also a canyon carved around the 6,500 ft level of a 10,000 ft plateau that generates its own weather. So I've had a lot of waiting around, for the light to be right and the rain to stop so photos can be taken.

This morning the clouds were only intermittent. I woke up in Standardville. Walked around to take a few photos. Exited a ruin, slipped on a board, and fell on my $500 camera. Destroying it.

This of course is a serious problem.

But I need a good camera to continue the project. My entire fall plans are based on having one to use. So. I took just over 1/5th of my checking account out of the bank and handed it over to Kmart today for an exciting new Nikon Digital SLR. Kind of like my old one, slighty nicer, about as expensive.

Going to stop by the mining museum on my way back out there. I'm running out of reading material. Gone through the pulp fiction, and already read and re read the geology books. Need some good deep something to have. There is a lot of down time out here, waiting for the light to get right.

Here's some of what I've been able to come up with...

Coal City:

One of the only images I've ever "cheated", slightly increasing the brightness... at Mohrland.

I took this picture last year... but it looks better in the afternoon light:

The orange "no tresspassing" spraypaint really screws up this historic structure, just outside the King Mine at Mohrland:

Except for a few concrete foundations, all that remains of Wattis.

Victor was a farming community. Until they realized farming without water isn't worth it. Just outside of Elmo, at the foothills of the San Rafael uplift

Spring canyon... had several old coal mining towns. Ruins are to be found both near the road level, and high up on the canyons. Most of the coal seems are about 1,000 feet about the road. The ruins up there are characterized by less graffiti and trash, usually.

Peerless

Spring Canyon, formerly known as Storrs. Run by Jesse Knight, Mormon mining bigwig from the Tintic district. Got coal here to run a Smelter near Eureka. Frowned upon miners getting drunk.

Standarville... has numerous photogenic photos near the road.
(This one pic from last year)

But if you hike up the canyon, which fortunately is on an undriveable grade, you get to some old buildings near the mine which have not be vandalized:

Ripple Marks in the Mesa Verde Sandstone.

All this coal was found in it, near the base of the Mesa Verde where it is still interfingering with the marine Mancos Shale. Coal formed in swamps near the shore. The sea level rose and fell many times, leading to the shale (slopey, crumbling) / sandstone (cliffy) layers that characterize most skylines around Carbon and Emery Counties.

* * *

Having to buy the new camera was a big setback. It's always something. Car accident. Car falling in a ditch. Camera breaking. Something. But... maybe having to make this sacrifice will force me to dedicate myself to this project even more. (if possible?)

The ____ Drama

2011-08-23T14:08:00.002-06:00

There was once somewhere on this blog a detailed description of my exasperation with various artists wasting their time and energy accusing each other of things they may or may not have done on the internet. And they wasted so much of their time on it. And getting others to care and waste their time on it. And then they started telling me that if I deleted my comments they would book me at their festivals. And I thought, what a silly world some have created for themselves.

So I deleted the old post because it had too many specific clues in the URL but I wanted to keep some of the words because they are worth saying. I also deleted it because the less specific inter artist drama that I or anyone else gets sucked into and clogs up the internet with, then the better.

In fact I think the points, which are good and valid and ought not be deleted, that I am trying to get across here works even better when you don't know who exactly is being referenced. You could read it and think it is about someone totally different and that might be the case because a lot of people like to start controversies with each other rather than doing other things.

Needless to say I won't be playing any festivals this winter anyway. There's no money in it, and hanging out in ghost towns taking pictures and writing books is a heck of a lot more profitable and interesting way for me to spend my time.

Here ya go...

* * *

I have known ______ for a few years. _____ has stayed at my house before a few times when I lived in DC....

It's kinda hard for me to understand the drama because I've been living out west for a few years where neither of these artists visit often and I've been pretty bogged down by my personal life as well. My only real connection to the issue is various email updates or pages like this I see from different people online. Different sides post links to different archived articles or emails and I have no idea if any of them are real or where just invented because anyone can write an html document that looks like anything.

As far as I know either BOTH sides are right... _______ perhaps said some insensitive rude comments once in an email, AND _______ has blown things out of proportion and unleashed legions of fans to attack faint internet ghosts of intolerance while very real and a lot more socially important far right nuttiness (ex: Arizona's racial profiling law, Global Warming Deniers, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Fox news in general and the vast majority of the know-nothing Tea Party) is never mentioned or opposed by their "organization" anywhere.

Or, perhaps NEITHER side is right... there never was an insensitive email or internet post, ______ never ripped of _______, and _______ has been forging documents to make _____ look like _____ is being attacked in an effort to get publicity and support... _________ and ______are right to expose and denounce _____... Yet, perhaps they too are involved in the conspiracy... maybe the wiley ol _______ himself is the one who wrote _____ comically partisan and juvenile defacement to his own wikipedia page in an effort to make ________ fans look stupid and overzealous. Could I ever prove that? No. Could I ever disprove it? No. Is that even *likely*? Probably not.

The point is that me trying to use the internet here to figure out who is right is completely pointless because the internet can never prove a document is real or not or who wrote it or when they wrote it. As much as I dig around this stuff there is no revelation, no catharsis, just mud slinging which makes me want to support BOTH artists at the same time that it turns me off to BOTH artists. Sort of like presidential elections- where both candidates have a bit of dirt on the other, they sling it, and then you end up voting for no one because you're turned off to both of them. Here though I don't know whether any of the dirt is real or who to believe.

The only solution to this controversy is for the next ____ Festival to host a sort of mock trial with each defendant representing their own case, internet experts as professional witnesses to certify the validity and timing of certain documents, and a jury of peers to hear the evidence and vote for one side of the other, awarding damages as justified. Of course that would never happen because people want to go to _____ to drink, listen to bands, and have a good time. Another reason it would never happen is because then the controversy would die. At this point BOTH artists are able to generate fans and empathy and support by keeping the controversy alive as long as possible allowing each of them to appear "besieged", without ever being able to definitively prove or disprove anything because all the "evidence" I have seen so far is hearsay and internet links to archived documents.

I think somewhere long ago there was a time when industrial bands stood for something and said what they believed in. I have already elsewhere and at length described the decline of that culture from a cutting edge, avante garde movement to a fashion-centric commercialized dance scene of overblown egos, Press-Play DJ's, Top 40 hits, no local support, and "bands" consisting of one or two people standing behind laptops, staring at backing track playlists, not moving, or pretending to play midi controllers that are not plugged into anything and basically just standing there looking bored with fixed eyes.

So perhaps it is fitting, that, rather than supporting one band or another for their courageous stand against apartheid, animal testing, mental institutions, war, bigotry, homophobia, or class inequity... today we should all be supporting one or another band against the ghosts they see in other bands, ghosts which might never be proven, and which might never even have existed in the first place.

Of course one side or the other might be right. The great bulk of circumstantial and written evidence I have seen so far is currently leading me to support _____ . But the damage is still done. Instead of attacking the outside world with intense music to *make people think* this scene- advanced in its state of terminal decline- turns in on itself to attack itself, to defend itself from the attacks of one another, attacks which in all likelihood are based on fictitious insults. "Industrial" has completely lost its relevance, its *raison d'être*, and its ability to direct its energies against the outside world. ______ drama is indeed the black hole of the internet. It is also the intellectual manifestation of the highest, final, parodic stage of this genre's development. I am eternally grateful to it for relieving me of those extra braincells I had been burdened with for so long.

Great Dissatisfaction with Geico

2011-07-30T12:01:00.001-06:00

Dear Geico,

I am very dissatisfied with your company. I have been paying you about $140 a month for 6 months and in that time I have had no accidents or car trouble or anything. It was getting time to renew or replace my policy with you and as a seasonal worker between Colorado and Utah, I was thinking about moving to Utah permanently and changing my car registration and insurance policy to reflect that.

I went to your website and filled out the info and this is the quote you gave me. $62 per month. I entered all the information on the Website exactly as it is on file on your computers and as I later informed the lady I spoke on the phone with. I was excited by this low, competitive quote and today I called up a Geico representative to discuss it with them. They were polite and friendly to talk to, but they actually gave me a much higher quote- about $200. And then they said that if I did not accept this quote and permanently change my address with your company it could create 'problems later' if I had to file a claim.

Where then, did the $62 per month quote come from? I assume your company can pay for website programmers with enough skills to use the same algorithms to calculate payments as your employees use on their computers when I talk to them over the phone. Did it fall from the sky? Was it the product of a random number generator?

This all seems very absurd. Where I was living when I had the $140 quote was Durango, Colorado. I had a 73 mile round trip commute every day from my house, just south west of town off Highway 160, all the way to Durango Mountain Resort, in the mountains 28 miles North of Durango. I would have to drive home every night through herds of elk and deer, blizzards and snow storms, ice, and many other dangerous drivers who tend to drive drunk in that area. That is where I had the wreck that totaled my previous vehicle, as the roads were clear 2 days before Christmas when I was driving home at night, but then one patch of black ice on a 7.5% downhill grade with a curve on it and a bridge just happened to be waiting for me and I hit it. Anyone working for Geico who it it too would have also totaled their car. I was even driving under the speed limit at the time.

Today I live in Green River, Utah. We are a town of 900 people on I-70. It is 103 miles to the next town, Salina, on I-70. That is the longest distance between any two towns with nothing in between on the entire US interstate system. This is a town of farmers and a few river outfitters, one of whom I work for. No one leaves there doors locked at night here, and there is almost no crime.

I also drive very rarely. About 5 times a summer I will drive into Colorado to guide a trip there, and maybe an equal number of times a summer I will drive to Moab, 50 miles away, to hang out with some friends. I live where I work, at a boathouse, and do not have a daily commute. So my driving occurs very rarely.

Despite the fact that I have moved to a safer, flatter, warmed, place, where I drive less, your company has chosen to raise my policy. I have no other conclusion I can reach except for the fact that you use your company to email misleading quotes to the very customers who pay your salaries, and use that to trick them into giving one of your representatives a phone call, where they then inform you your policy must now be higher than the one you are already paying.

I am very dissatisfied with Geico today, and I will be looking at other companies in the next month who will offer me a better deal. At that point in time I will cancel my financial relationship with your company. I am also going to publish this letter on my blog, http://laughingfish.blogspot.com , and I am going to tell all of my friends and co workers about my experience with your company and encourage them never to do business with it.

Sincerely,

Christian
Geico policy number XXXX-XX-XX-XX

--- On Tue, 7/5/11, GEICO wrote:

From: GEICO
Subject: Christian, your GEICO rate quote request
To: cawright2007@yahoo.com
Date: Tuesday, July 5, 2011, 8:43 AM

GEICO
Christian,

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Message ID: NetQuote SNAP

The Show Goes On...

2011-07-27T15:09:00.006-06:00

"A future generation of left leaders is being silenced. Gunned down in Norway. Beaten bloody in Cairo+Madrid. Locked up in Utah"

-Naomi Klein

The above quote was motivated by world events as well as a recent turn of events in Salt Lake City, where Tim DeChristopher, aka Bidder 70 was sentenced yesterday to 2 years in prison, beginning immediately, for his actions as a whistleblower who disrupted an oil and gas auction of BLM lands in 2008 that itself was later invalidated by the Department of the Interior. Here is his statement. It is worth reading. How many pallid lies and halfheartedness have you endured upon your ears to date about the failure of anyone in charge to do anything about climate change? It was high time to find something better to do with yourself anyways.

I recall, at times like this the many CEOs, stockbrokers, speculators and board of directors members I never met or knew or heard about whose consciously reckless actions had by 2008 resulted in my and your own unemployment. I think about how 99.999% of these people will never serve a fraction of the time in jail that Tim will. Most, it seems, have never even been shown the inside of a court room. But the dangerous precedent of Tim's economic monkey wrenching (which was later in essence agreed with and vindicated by the Federal Government) was too much to let off with a slap on the wrist!

Direct action against climate change? Indeed. What a principle that sets! A principle dangerous radicals like me have been arguing for for years- that the people of the world have other options besides either a) installing private solar panels they can't afford on the sides of homes they don't own, or b) doing nothing while private energy interests continue to amass fortunes on the basis of ecological catastrophe.

Impossible. Dangerous. Stomp it out. Crush it. Lock it up. Throw away the key.

Repression, yes. And thank you Namoi Klein for your quote, acknowledgment, and framing of this moment in its historical context. For rescuing me from my despair. For you see, I stopped to eat at the Wendy's restaurant in Vernal. And at the Wendy's restaurant in Vernal not one but two large flat screened TVs are required to keep the patrons supplied with the necessary input of FOX news coverage. This is, after all, the Uinta Basin: heart of Utah's oil and gas boom. And Mr. O'Reilly himself was up there, releasing into the atmosphere his trademarked exhaust of lies and bigotry. It seemed a Christian Fundamentalist Terrorist in Norway had decided to bomb and shoot several young Social-Democratic activists at a summer retreat.

Clearly, this was inconvenient to O'Reilly's most orthodox interpretation of religion and violence, and after approximately 2 minutes of discussing this shocking global event, the image on the screen changed to one of a crescent moon with a star on a red back ground and those menacing words: Muslim Terrorism. Or was it Muslim Extremism? Perhaps. But it did remain for the rest of the segment, and animate those beady eyes with a passion we'd otherwise have been all so much more the worse for missing out on. For clearly, convincing me that Muslim Terrorists are much greater of a threat to my existence that are Christian Terrorists is a much more important, and far nobler, undertaking than the actual reporting of the most violent and unfortunate political event to have occurred in perhaps the most peaceful and harmonious European country since the Second World War.

Yes, Mr. O'Reilly, you are a tricky fish.

So I have been, at the boat house here, discussing these matters. With my kind. And political ideas and thoughts have appeared and grown and become relevant with an intensity they do not, on average, possess in Green River, Utah, population 900. It was at this exact moment in time that a friend, via email, demanded I explain myself, for why, with such ideas, did I spend time in DC, and why, on earth, did I leave?

Much longer space, than this internet is capable of hosting, would be required for me to fully answer any such questioning comprehensively. But I did come up with a response, and not having written or discussed anything much political lately, we can go ahead and share it. For we do live in an age, of Future Left Leaders. And they are being silenced, gunned down, beaten bloody, and locked up. If being a Future Left Leader is such a hazardous occupation, and one apparently still necessary, it might be worth it to remind ourselves of why such things are necessary.

What ever happened to the Past Left Leaders? Why do we need new ones anyway?

Well friend... I will tell you about what I saw in Washington, DC. And why today I will have nothing to do with it. I'll share a few reminisces, as I'm taking a break from history writing and feeling fairly literary anyway...

I went to Washington, DC to study and learn about "Political Science." Largely, I was greatly frustrated, as over and over again I found the best "scientific" principles out there were ignored. Out of favor, completely, they were in those days of the Bush Administration. More carnal passions of greed, war, fear, and bigotry, the taking advantage of the weak by the strong, the meek by the boorish, were dominant. I was in the front lines then, of course, of the radical ferment. And lead I did as best I could my armies of radicalized students (and anyone else!) against that juggernaut of corruption and oppression. Time and again, it seemed, such energies would lapse into despair, as the first movements did not secure any quick victories. My peers at such time would retreat to their academics, and were more and more difficult to extract from the comfort of the dormitories.

And particularly so during an election year! Ah yes... how hard then were the straws of inevitable, liberal betrayal and failure so desperately clenched! And I saw it all with my own eyes, from my front row seat at the heart of movements... how the country's largest gay rights organization unleashed its armies of minimum wage staffers, volunteers, and other convinced do gooders to dismantle an incipient gay marriage movement in 2004- one that so arrogantly threatened to embarrass John Kerry for his inability to say the "M" word, and admit the voters he was taking for granted might themselves strongly feel their own civil rights were worth having today- rather than in some distant, post-election future.

Similar prostrations reverberated throughout the antiwar movement, as the leaders of those crumbling, factious organizations lifted as high as they could this candidate who was doing everything he could to repudiate his relevant past as a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I was there with a small crowd outside the "Iraqi" embassy that November when the assault on Fallujah- postponed for just after the election- was underway. Quite a few Iraqi mothers, fathers, and children then- not wise enough to flee their homes on the eve of their liberation by our advancing armies- had their skin burned off those nights by the dumping of white prosperous onto civilian neighborhoods turned battle zones. Only a stunning, echoing silence was heard, from the shadows of the Kerry Campaign. The same timbre I might have heard more recently, as Israel killed a few thousand more civilians with 2009's bombing campaign in the Gaza strip, and Obama's vacant, stalling inertia, refused to intervene- much less take a stand- and put a stop to that madness. No. The shipments of bombs continue to this day- painfully unopposed.

That same year I do remember seeing at least one pretty inspiring sight. It was on the faces of over a million women who turned out on the mall in April for a rally to protect women's rights. Quite a few, young, attractive, militant proto-subversives were there, desperate to re-invigorate a real fight against sexism, abortion restrictions, discrimination in health care, and the like...

We had all the crowd we needed, for such a fight. Yes. But again, it was pacified, misled, and betrayed from the front. Madeline Albright was there, waving her feminist credentials, as the woman who said on 60 Minutes the murder of half a million Iraqi children by the slow strangulation of sanctions on that country was "worth it" to "contain" Saddam Hussein. Hillary Clinton made her appearance as well. Clearly, she never had much control over her husband- though I never recalled hearing any protests from her when he signed the "Defense of Marriage" Act, or came up with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" to officiate discrimination throughout the nation's largest workforce.

Maybe I'm getting too side tracked on different issues? Oh yes, here's one more relevant, abortion! Thank you Hillary, for leading this rally, after all your hard work to promote abortion as being ever more "safe, legal, and rare". Yes, rarer indeed it gets all the time, as states pass restrictions requiring teenage girls' conservative, religious, and/or incestuous parents to officiate their consent prior to their daughters' own exercise of control over their own bodies. Rare indeed, are abortions today, as few private health insurance plans will ever pay for them (though convenient indeed are their subsidies for viagra!). And difficult, yes... As over 80% of counties in the nation have no abortion provider, and the ones that do can be hard to get to past the crowds of exterior religious fanatics.

How eager I was for some sort of rejuvenation of the fight for this very basic human right, which I myself have with partners exercised twice in my life. Alas, it was not to be. No call for marches, community organizations, or clinic defense. No inspiring introduction of legislation. Nothing. Just vote John Kerry. Yes, thank you large pro-choice organization, for the "vote John Kerry" sign- I have so much to thank you for! Particularly for your careful documentation of legislative votes, which for 2003 showed that John Kerry only showed up to vote on 3 out of 11 abortion related bills that came up for consideration that year. To his everlasting credit, he did manage to vote the "correct" way all 27% of the time it mattered while he was a Senator!

Understand now, though, I am a kind of utopian, out of touch radical, dreamer, and idealist. My wishes and my vision of course is incompatible with the broader human nature- of ever being lead by anyone who will stand up to fight for you greater than 27% of the time!

I left... that place. The cesspool of corruption is very well spinning away on its own without me there to endure the vagueries of its own daily nuances and disappointments. I have little love lost, for the politicians, NGOs, or even the drug dealers who used to hang out on my stoop and sexually harass my girlfriends. I'll take my chances with the canyons, the rivers, white water, grizzly bears, and dehydration. Much safer here, in the heart of America. Escaping the horror, as I am, by burying myself in it!

Clearly, I still have a lot of opinions about all that. Politics. Yes. Is it frustrating that I am politically irrelevant here in rural Utah, with all these great ideas busting out of my head? Of course! But far less frustrating that actually living in a place like Washington, DC!

Then you may surprised to hear that I do have hope, still, for the country. Hope in the faces, words, and actions, of my kindred souls across America. The witty comments on facebook. The rides I got hitchhiking... largely from undocumented immigrants. The couch and five months of the backyard campsite when I was homeless. The volunteers at the food bank. The small protest. The radical students. The nutty professor. The guest lecturer, and the crowd that came to see him. Wind and Solar. Melon farmers. River guides. Amy Goodman. Lupe Fiasco.

Change comes to Washington, not from Washington. And usually, it stops, mired in the mud of legislative inertia, slime, and general bureaucratic gobbledygook, before it ever gets very far, or deep. We will see change come to Washington, one day, though only long after it has been accomplished most everywhere else. In the wake of a victorious, advancing, revolutionary army... or perhaps brought down by the wrath of Good God himself, peeling back the very flesh of the earth to swallow, bury, and efface that abomination, albeit in a grossly belated manner. I am not sure which is more likely to occur, or happen first... But I am sure, that tunneling in my own patient way across the heartland, I'll find a way to contribute, one way or another.

Like many, I suppose, my frustrations, passions, and desires build up privately, and release themselves through more discreet and acceptable channels, than the general strike or insurrection, for which I am finding it is required for the whole society to be in touch with its own energies and frustrations on a far more intimate and conscious way than any few radicals can, by their own energies, convince it to attain, by the simple day to day routines of low level attrition.

But that ought to be rather the point, isn't it?

Who wants to live in a world where everyone is a bystander? Resigned, marginalized, and silent! Where politics is left only to distant elections, money, and treacherous "experts" to screw up on our behalf? My fancy political credentials, I am sure, will one day rise, as Eugene Debs put it, "with the masses, not from the masses."

That then, I hope, is enough to answer your questioning about Washington, DC!

So let's hear it for Tim DeChristopher, those kids in Norway, Cairo, or anywhere else they're needed and stepping up. The world, desperately, is going to require more future left leaders than it presently has. Or had. As the case may be.

The Ripping of the Rivers' Tears

2011-06-19T23:41:00.009-06:00

Last night I walked on down a trail
Along a rivers' edge
The red rock country lifted hearts
And stirred my spirits' end.
Three trips were camping by the shore
The one I happened find
Was being educated
On the matter of fine wines.

Fine wines from Malborough, New Zeland
Napa and Merlot, CA.
Elevation, soil and rain
Aeration, steel, oak and names
Were all that night to me explained.

Far off outside Durango
On a lonely Mesa hill
Frank's wife looks at the ashes
Still sitting on the sill.

We started with the Savingon
And then moved on to Oregon
Willamette, names once mis pronounced-
I now transcend those clumsy doubts!
A smile I shared, a sip of wine
A few more and a jug.
My tongue bit hard- I tasted blood
My jaw clenched dumb and snug.

I couldn't quite recall exact locations of details
That Bobs wife fought that time she heard
Bob's final will and wails.
What fragrant nose of sweet perfume
Of tannins, leather, spice-
Were fermenting in that garage
Of Bob's tormented life?

How small I wondered is the grape,
Growing through the sun and shade?
In perfect balance with the days
Being pinched (not moments late!)
The hands of experts will decide
The perfect ways to trim the time
On sunny hills of grass and sand
The Clos du Bois and Crawford brands...

Smaller still and how forgot
Such lives fraught with dreaded rot!
And left to wither on the vine
Unknown, unloved, and undivine
(Unemployed most of the time).

Some more and then 'twas time to go
Back up to my own tent and show
I thanked the hosts with words sincere
(It's all they'll ever know I fear!)
My mind weighed heavy with these thoughts
Such balance balanced in my cup
Such chaos reigning all around
It seems to overflow the towns.

No experts would they venture near
To study sacrifices dear
families, wives, surviving sons
Left behind the funeral drums
No proud service for the man
Who ended life by his own hands
When he was told "no work" again.

High and fast the flows this year,
Though tonight I'm nowhere near
I listen hard and strain to hear
The ripping of the rivers' tears
The subjects known and studied there.

Dying Bears and National Parks, Music, Iraq, Boris Badenov and Malcolm X

2011-04-17T20:48:00.003-06:00

News capsule:

From James I got this witty gem, Everything Popular is Wrong: Making it in Electronic Music, Despite Democratization, a great analysis of trends that happened to music the past decade, which are all really key to understanding why I live in a cab over camper at the edge of the desert instead of still playing shows and selling records and having drinks with girls in black latex.

His grasp of what has happened is fantastic. However, for those looking for a happy ending to the story, I'll go ahead and ruin it for you.

"...Therefore there is a need to have sources of income that are independent from your own music’s direct returns. That is, any income that can be obtained with spending very little time on it — no day jobs allowed unless you are a grossly overpaid consultant for a few hours a month, like I am occasionally... Separating income and music in your head can be deeply rewarding. The freedom experienced in creating music to your own criteria first and even “against the market” if necessary is way more elegant than trying to squeeze as much as possible out of music that has to produce your paycheck. That is another factor contributing to an artist’s longevity in the market — having guts and principles. Get your head around it, do your homework and you’ll quickly see solutions that work for you."

Yes, indeed, that elegant freedom of my guts and principles, my laborious homework, the freedom experienced in creating music to my own criteria first. Mr. Goldmann's "solutions" for "separating income and music in your head" seem to retreat back to the author's own original thesis, that "Being a 'musician' is increasingly becoming a profession for those coming from inherited wealth or being mercantily exceptionally clever."

Sigh...

Then! Yellowstone National Park is experiancing a major ecosystem disruption but fourtunately the friendly Park Rangers are there to kill the starving bears when they break into your trash. Check out The Ghost Park

Those who've been trying desperately for years (and often, succeding?) to pretend the Iraq war doesn't exist or effect them and won't probably continue for longer should double check the recent march where A Million Marchers Tell the US To Get Out of Iraq by the End of 2011 or Else.

And finally, in your own philosophical grasping for a framework to put all these pieces together, let us first understand, and then dismiss, the fallout from that day When Alan Met Ayn... And Tanked Our Economy, before (hip) hopping on over to Roots Grow Deep's latest posting, On Masculinity and Homophobia Pt 1: A Reflection on Hip Hop, Malcolm, and More.

Brother Malcolm

2011-04-13T04:26:00.004-06:00

Do you know what my favorite Malcolm X quote is?

It's what he said in 1964 when he was attacking the Democratic Party, which in the south was made up of aggressive segregationists who were sending the police and the dogs and the fire hoses on the protesters. He called out the Democratic Party, which President Lydon Johnson, shall we say, was rather annoyed by, because at the time he was trying to establish a relationship with the civil rights movement (and channel it into less systemically threatening directions, such as voter registration).

Anyways, Malcolm makes this speech, and right in the middle of it, he stops to say:

"I know you don't like me saying that. I'm not the kind of person who come here to say what you like. I'm going to tell you the truth whether you like it or not."

You know what the crowd in Detroit did where he was speaking after he said that?

They clapped.

The full speech.

A lot of it was very specific to that time period, to what was going on politically then and what the forces and attitudes were at the time. That beign said, there's some mighty fine grains of universal truth in there.

Drinking Tequila and Talking to a Stick

2011-04-09T23:37:00.012-06:00

River notes... from the small notebook in the first aid kit

Deer flies and Hawaiian shirts
Commuting with nature, DEET
Peeling small cuts to catch
And impale upon hooks with, fish

Wish upon Iridium
Satellites...
Backpacks vs river trips
Dabblers and Divers
In love

Taking my chances with the bugs
I really love this river
Wish this trip was at high water
And would just keep going by

WTF is Stateline Rapid?
Stopping to eat my second lunch
Wondering where yesterday's campsite is

Ants in the cookies
Antibiotics and cowboy ruins
Declining reclusive impoverished
Expectations for future deaths

Lying on my pad sleeping bag
In the back of the van
With an attractive young
18 year old geology student
Who can only text message

Over it and not so fresh
Able to let it fade forget it
What it meant

Hostel healthcare
Washing out an eye and
Patching up drunk Bob
Hyponatremia and Benadryl
In Ester's back yard

Hard winter of slightly
Mentally retarded white people
With money
Chili Cheese Fries and
Filet Mignon
Car crash suicide
Social life...

Nice restaurants give me anxiety

In a canyon
1,000 feet below the earth's crust
Drinking tequila
And talking to a stick
A stick I have been traveling with for days

Free in my own way

An informative
And beautiful
Place to loose yourself for a while

Which Freedom Package Will You Get?

2011-03-23T00:49:00.001-06:00

The Daily Show - America's Freedom Packages
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Intervention in Libya

2011-03-21T01:56:00.003-06:00

The place for a moral man is never on the side lines. It is always better to take a position, have it not work out right, and learn from it, that it is to never take any positions at all, and enjoy the comfort and praise of never having been wrong.

These past several weeks and months, as I have been closely following Mid East politics, every night I've gone to bed with a heightened sense of emotion. Due to the time change... while I sleep everything will happen... and increasingly... I know that many people will die. Then when I wake up I will read about the outcome of the protests, street battles, or increasingly, real battles. It is an unnerving routine... though not nearly as unnerving as it is for those actually living in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, or Bahrain.

Lately the center of gravity of the Arab Revolution has shifted to Libya. The pro democracy movement has there encountered a dictator more entrenched, intelligent, and crafty than so far they have met elsewhere. Key to Ghadaffi's battlefield successes of the past two weeks has been his decades long policy of keeping the national army weak. Instead he has crafted a state that relies on it only partially. The role of armed force is shored up by tribal alliances and separate pro-regime military forces, all designed in order to forestall the threat of coup attempts.

This is a key difference between Libya and Egypt. When it was clear Mubarak's regime was isolated, discredited, and could no longer rule, there was a strong central military to step in and tell him it was time to go. In Libya, despite the overwhelming marginalization of Ghadaffi, and despite the complete insanity and baselessness of his propaganda ("The rebels are on hallucinogenic drugs given to them by Al Quaeda"), he has been able to reorganize his remaining supporters and mercenaries into a counter attack that for the past two weeks has regained momentum.

The pro democracy movement is wide and it is deep. But when it comes to strict military engagements, it is hopelessly outgunned, out trained, and out organized. Which brings us to the current intervention.

There have been debates online and articles online and much deep suspicions of any Western Intervention on the part of most intelligent, thinking people I am in regular communication with. I share these suspicions. The credibility gap is jaw dropping, while we have killed many civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we support autocratic regimes who repress pro-democracy fighters elsewhere (notably Bahrain, though the deaths of a few dozen or hundred protesters there are nowhere near the scale of thousands of deaths Ghadaffi is now inflicting), we are now supposed to trust a combined Naval and Air Force that includes the US and its cruise missiles as a strong component as it seeks to "humanitarianly" intervene in Libya.

I went searching online to read more. This article on Al Jazeera put together a case against intervention. Here is another by American socialists I am usually in complete agreement with. What SW does very well that, say, mainstream pro-intervention papers have not, is point out the hypocrisy of opposing Ghadaffi now, after only recently selling him weapons.

Most media reports now describe Ghaddafi as a long-time nemesis of U.S. foreign policy-makers. But this flushes down the memory hole more than a decade, in which the Bush and then Obama administrations viewed Qaddafi as a madman-turned-ally and an essential component of the U.S. "global war on terror."

The SW article expresses fear about mission creep to a ground intervention. I worry a ground intervention may do more harm than good, particularly if it becomes a protracted occupation a la Iraq or Afghanistan. As with other humanitarian interventions, most politically messy, reprehensible, and at times rather unhumanitarian activity tends to occur after the first strikes, when "the focus shifts from addressing an immediate crisis to achieving the longer-term goals of the most powerful governments [involved in the intervention], especially the U.S."

The same article offers some useful historical examples to distrust "humanitarian interventions" from Somolia in the early 1990s and the Bombing of Serbia in 1999. This all brings us to what I think is probably the most genuine potential risk that may backfire from intervening:

Qaddafi is hoping to do something similar in Libya, and U.S. and European bombs are giving him an aura of legitimacy he couldn't have claimed a week ago--by allowing him to act as if he is a staunch opponent of Western intervention in North Africa.

Broader analysis is useful... but if you are a citizen of a place like Benghazi or Misrata, and the artillery of your dictator is falling amid your outskirts, you tend in the immediate term to value, say, an Air Force a lot more than a well written article of broader analysis. Rightly, the SW article admits as much, that "Most people facing the bombs of the Qaddafi government will have been happy to see that bombardment stopped or slowed, no matter how."

What I don't like about this article is that, though the authors offered much useful background info, warned about some possible negative outcomes, and listed some of Europe's long term interests and ulterior motives in Libya, they conspicuously avoided taking a stand, one way or the other, on whether the airstrikes of the past 24 hours were worth doing or not. I just sent them a letter addressing this point and I hope to see it printed or posted online soon.

That's something I see a lot of people doing. Many say they don't like interventions, point out how screwed up the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are, talk about oil interests and ulterior motives, but DON'T TAKE A STAND on the pressing issue of the immediate hour! Ghadafffi's armies are at the door step of the last rebel outposts. They are shelling them. Soon they will invade with tanks and a massacre will occur. You are the president of the United States. You have an Air Force. You have international authorization to use it to prevent a massacre. What do you do?

It's easy to say you "oppose" this or that policy or decision when you are not the one having to make it. Courage means having the guts to go on the record and make a difficult decision one way or the other- whether or not you will be proved wrong later. When you are in the Gates of Lodore and your raft is heading right into Lucifer rock you have to do something now. Immediately. Because if you don't you are going to be fucked. So use your oars. Do something. Even if it's wrong it's better than doing nothing, or than standing on the shore criticizing someone in the situation you are not in who is forced to make decisions that you are not forced to make.

The Al Jazeera article that listed "The Drawbacks of Intervention in Libya" also made for some interesting reading. But not so interesting as the 90+ comments readers made after it! All of which I read. Some excerpts from the discussion:

"I wonder if those in Bengazi would appreciate a fine piece of writing or say an F16????"

"...That sounds like a great research project for a doctorate if you have fours years to burn under the California sun, but not when Gaddafi is slaughtering your brothers and sisters now."

"A lot of strange bedfellows doing a lot of strange things right now. "

‎"I hear of the Arab League's dissent over the "No-Fly" zone and going too far??? Where are THIER jets? Why don't they Lead The Way? It sounds a little "two-faced" to approve the help, but criticize execution when they offer no blood or mon...ey in this effort. I would be ashamed to be in the Arab League... Another question, what were the U.N. forces to do? Taking out the aircraft capability of the Loyalists, but leaving tanks and rocket launchers to finish a little less quickly what the air-force was doing is a mistake? This is the frustration with dealing with the Arab League..."

"It is always fun to second guess what 'should' have been done, but what this cowardly author didn't do was say what 'they' would have done in the light of not only the Libyan opposition forces asking.. pleading... begging for assistance, ...but Arab voices all over the world demanding "Where is the West, where is the U.S.". Would this author been happier to see the opposition be crushed? This is exactly what would have happened and no amount of meetings, or sanctions or political statements would have changed that. This author should have the courage to come out and say that is what they want and not hide behind the clever execution of criticism of those trying to help.

Life is full of inconsistency..."

One interesting parallel on the discussion was non-intervention against the Khumer Rouge, and the hesitancy of intervention in Libya. The starting point today is that there are a lot of effective weapons and advanced aircraft in the US and in Western Europe. It's a good human instinct to stand up for underdogs, particularly when forces are grossly disproportionate, and autocrats use overwhelming military force to target civilians. The reason for non intervention in Cambodia was the disastrous failure of the war in Vietnam and the political fall out from it (though we might also mention that the Khumer Rouge probably would not have come to power if American actions in Cambodia and neighboring countries were not so destabilizing to the Cambodian government!).

The reasons for hesitancy in Libya are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the current US support of Israel's occupation and periodic bombardment of the West Bank and Gaza, and to a lesser though still significant extent our support of many still existing autocrats throughout the Middle East who are right now faced with their own pro-democracy rebellions .

Eventually, through long and bloody struggle, Imperialism can burn itself out. At great human cost it can be fought off (for a time), discredited, and forced to return home for a while to lick its wounds while the leaders try and plan new ways to maintain "influence" and access to resources and markets without armies, or to at least conduct military operations on a small scale and behind the backs of their own citizens. For examples, see Britain and France after WWII, Russia after 1989, or America after Vietnam.

This inevitably makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the armies, aircraft, technology, and genuine good will of Western citizens (note: not politicians) to be of timely, politically permissible assistance to conduct a truly humanitarian intervention when the need for one presents itself.

The sooner we get rid of the present system of rule by the few over the many, gross wealth inequality, segregation and massive prison populations, the ruling emotions of fear and guilt (as opposed to the emotions of love and solidarity!), and not least of all the habits of allowing our politicians to use our military for their own adventures and the enrichment of their Wall Street friends rather than only when it is genuinely needed- the sooner we will be able to actually weigh the pros and cons of military interventions on any kind of honest or rational basis.

Until then, situations such as Libya will continue to present themselves.

All that being said...

Western leftists wanting to support the Libyan rebels, and at the same time not wanting Western aircraft to take out Ghadaffi's Air Force (and more importantly) and tanks and artillery, are attempting to have their cake and eat it too. Of course they are right to point out hypocrisies and inconsistencies and to encourage us to exercise scrutiny. But to stand by and not do anything with our military is to allow a massacre, which to me is more morally reprehensible than making the decision to allow people you politically disagree with to use their might for something that will actually benefit a progressive movement- not to mention the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The greatest danger might be Ghadaffi's ability to use Western intervention to paint his cause as "anti-imperialist" and thus retain some degree of support. I do not think the majority of Libyans who have seen his henchmen driving through the streets shooting indiscriminately at civilians will be so naive as to fall for this. Least of all would the people of Misrata or Benghazi, who have been the loudest voices asking for foreign military assistance. Yet it may happen, he may regain some support, that will at least allow him to hold some territory where he can bully everyone else into silence.

At the end of the day, I think the air strikes are worth the risk. There are many times when whatever decision you make you are still going to live with regret. At that point the choice is the one where the regret will be the easiest to bear. Indecision and passivity, however, are at times like these the greatest danger. Yes the French Resistance in World War II was happy to see Allied Troops eventually march in. And yes the bombing of Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo and the Nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were crimes against humanity. But how many of the 50 million deaths from that conflict could have been avoided if the politicians of the world had been men of action before 1939! Would they not still have been imperialists at that time? Would they still not have saved many lives? Do I care if the person saving my life is only doing it to advance their own long term interests?

The only possible anti-intervention argument that I think makes any sense at all is the following one: "Less people will hypothetically die if we allow Ghadaffi to massacre his people now, and then stay in power, than will die if we support the rebels with our Airpower, which runs the risk of dragging the revolution out into a protracted civil war. Therefore we should pull back, tell the people of Benghazi and Misrata and everywhere else that for the sake our analysis of their country's long term future we have decided to do nothing and let them die."

I personally am not prepared to make such a statement and until non-interventionists come out and say that clearly and honestly I am not going to be able to take seriously their opposition to the bombing that right now is the only thing turning back the unleashed armies of a madman.

Long live the heroic people of Lybia. May they have the wisdom and the strength to find their way through the array of friends and enemies.

Lybia's Darkest Hour

2011-03-18T18:20:00.001-06:00

Will revolutionary Egypt stand by, arms at its sides, while a massacre occurs next door?

Revolutions do not confine themselves to national borders. Despite how many Bonapartist despots masquerading as "revolutionaries" have tried to justify national aggrandizement using this language... it nonetheless remains a fact. Every time, whether through cowardice, indecisiveness, or cynicism, a new revolutionary government attempts to stay within its borders and ignore the plight of its not-yet-as-successful neighbors, the results are always the same: massacres. Often followed by the further isolation, and eventual fall, of the one or few countries where the movement was victorious.

The last century furnished a brutally plentiful series of examples of this phenomenon. What happened to the revolutionary movement in Finland in 1918, or Spain in 1939, or Chile in 1973, is now well on its way to occurring in Benghazi.

Fascism, always, is the price paid by those willing to launch, but unable to finish, a revolution. In the next few weeks, the people of Lybia will furnish more martyrs for the Arab revolution than hitherto have been required. Let all who can assist, assist. Because all who can betray, already have.

Challenge Accepted

2011-02-28T02:11:00.005-07:00

Recently I realized there was 2 more months of winter left.

Then I realized I was finally getting integrated into Durango life. Met some socially and ecologically conscious people, started going to some meetings, found a great professor with a class to sit in on, found a great library to spend time in, got life back together, got a truck, got out of a bad relationship, start back on task with my own research and writing...

Then I realized there was only a month left. Purgatory closes at the end of March. All indications are pointing to a great summer, though there is still such a level of uncertainty involved that nervousness will simmer until all is figured out by Mid May.

These are the goals:

Turn a binder into the life and controversy of Butch Cassidy

Make a geology & Uranium mining binder

Turn all the WFR and Wilderness First Aid notes into a binder. Re-read the WFR textbook.

Read about the Anasazi, take notes on them from the two books I have.

Get a topper for the truck.

Build false bottoms for the truck.

Get a hitch for the truck.

Get river equipment together.

Do 300 miles of river before May 1st.

Mine the Ft Lewis Library for every scrap of data about Utah Hardrock Mining for the ghost town book.

Mine the Ft Lewis library for all their uranium rush history.

Attend water and policy class.

Use my ski pass before the winter ends.

Rebuild the first aid kit.

Do Taxes.

Start an Astronomy Binder.

----

This is all going to take a lot more self discipline than sleeping in till noon, making food and going to work, getting home at 1 am, reading the internet and going to bed.

Colorado is interesting. But I'm starting to think it isn't for me. I don't make lots of money and live in a Front Range City. I don't smoke pot or drink that much. I don't ski. There's really no one keeping me here by myself. Next winter I might stay in Utah.

I can't wait to get back there...

Home, Home on the Range

2011-02-10T16:06:00.008-07:00

My dear brother and his wife have sent me a handy, small, portable camera in the mail for Christmas! You may have noticed less pictures here lately, which has been due to the fact that snapfish.com stopped working with my cameraphone and my $500 nikon's battery recharger stopped working.

Here's a few pics documenting my transition from homeless guy and guy who has to hitch hike to work because his car crashed to home owner who has a shiny new truck!

The shiny new truck is a beautiful Pyrite Mica colored 2011 Toyota Tacoma 4 cylinder manual 4X4 extended cab with a 6 foot bed. It's about as stripped down a Tacoma as you can get, as I decided the "off road package" and the "SR5 / TRD package" are basically expensive stuff you don't need. I'm not going to take a $24,000 vehicle anywhere I need rear locking differentials, as good as it looked in the promotional pamphlet! The 4 wheel drive gets me anywhere I need to go, and the 9 inch clearance is nice. I'm getting just over 21 mpg right now which I heard goes up after the first few thousand miles.

This is my beautiful home:

It is located about 6 miles SE of Durango, Colorado, behind some nice people's house that I met on the internet. We're about a mile off Highway 160 up a dirt road. I'm also about a 15 minute walk from Mercy Hospital, which is located in the same valley. Elevation here is about 7,000 feet.

As you can see the home itself is a 1972 cab over camper built by Pilgrim Manufacturing Co, INC. that sits on a flatbed trailer. Got the whole deal for $350, worth at least the price of the flatbed alone! It made it here, just outside Duragno, over the passes from Denver being towed behind a 4 cylinder Subaru.

Some stuff stored under the overhanging front:

It has a lovely new aluminum + tar paper roof I built, as the old roof was frost, sun, and water damaged to hell and leaked terribly.

Along with a leaky roof, the previous owner had also ripped the camper jacks off. This left wood and insulation exposed that could have absorbed water and stressed the siding when driving on the highway. I repaired the damage with "great stuff" spray foam, that I shaved down after it dried. Then I drilled in some aluminum flashing and then caulked around the flashing. Now it's pretty bomb proof.

I have this nice big yard. There are foothills of the La Platas across the valley . The rock making up the hills is Cretaceous - era Mesa Verde Sandstone that was uplifted to steep angles by the laccolithic La Plata mountain range as it rose millions of years ago.

There are a lot of deer and elk that hang out in the valley. We see them around the house pretty often. There are also coyotes. Sometimes packs of them yelp at night.

I have a nice soft bed that is warm. I put extra tarpaper under it to better insulate it from the cold air outside, and I taped up some insulating material under the roof hatch to keep warm air from going up and out as fast.

I have these nice shelves. I have more books stored behind them and there are an additional two shelves further down that do not appear in the picture. Book shelves are nice.

There used to be a fridge here that didn't work. I ripped it out and turned the space into a clothes shelf. It's really a lot more organized than it looks.

There's also a more regular closet with shirts and wetsuits in it

This is the heater I bought from Home Depot. It was only about $40, and it works well. It warms up the place pretty fast, though if I come into the house cold around 2 or 4 am when it's less than about 10 degrees outside it takes a while to warm up.

The kitchen is pretty sweet.

There's a two burner hot plate from Walmart and also one of those kettles that plugs into the electricity and heats water really fast. That is great for tea, coffee, soup, and making hot water for dishes with. The sink is a two basin sink, and over one basin I have put a large wooden cutting board that serves as my prep counter. The drain water from the sink drains outside where it runs into an 8 ft bit of extra aluminum from the roof that carries the water a few feet away.

This prevents the water from building up near the tire just outside of the drain, which through freeze and thaw would threaten to sink the tire in mud.

Electricity itself comes into the house via an extension cord connected to the outside of the house

The original outlet on the outside of the camper was long since cut away so cracking a window, cutting some screen, and running an extension cord was the easiest way to get power in here. Duct tape around the cord keeps cold from coming in. The outlet on the house is routed to a 12 amp breaker, which means if I use the heater and the stove at the same time it trips the breaker. My coworker says I should just buy a higher rated breaker and ask the home owners to install it but I haven't got around to doing this yet.

There is a nice living room too:

This is where the computer usually lives. It gets wifi from the main house that is pretty fast, so I can download movies, or watch the live feed from Al Jazeera English for the latest developments on the Egyptian Revolution. There's enough space for two people to sit and eat across the table from each other.

I put down a second layer of carpet on the floor to keep it from being so cold when I walk on it. ACE hardware sold these great narrow carpet lengths that just fit the "hallway" perfectly.

There is also an absorbent mat on the floor by the door where I leave my shoes so as not to track snow all into the house.

My lighting needs at night have been met by a $9 lamp from Home Depot.

It clips onto anywhere, but usually is clipped onto a cabinet handle. It provides enough light for the whole place on a single one of those energy efficient bulbs.

What's that hanging next to the lamp?

Oh, its my ski pass from Purgatory. Those things sell for a few hundred bucks though mine was free. Haven't used it yet. It's a 73 mile round trip for me to get there, which I don't really feel like driving on my day off. Especially because I own no ski equipment and have never been skiing. I'm sure I'll rent something and try it eventually though.

There are a lot of cabinets that are handy for plates, bowls, food storage, etc...

To some of you reading I am sure this appears to be an arduous existence. This is true, in some ways. But it is looking worth it. Though the transition to living here was akward and difficult I am now making decent money again between two jobs and able to save. From late April to October, life is amazing. People pay me to take them down the river. I get to do private trips on my own. I hang out in desert towns and make friends. I cook hunted bunny rabbit over the campfire. I visit ghost towns and photograph them and write about them. Life is about as free and perfect as possible.

Still I have not found a winter equivalent. I am not a glamorous "ski instructor". I haven't even skied. I just work. I remove your wet carpet and pad and drywall and insulation when your pipes freeze. I feed you food and sell you beers when you come to the ski resort and you get hungry. So it is just work and save. Then the Spring life will be great again. And at least on my days off I get to write.

All my punk rock and Western friends with liberal arts degrees are now applying to law school. They decided that while summer work is fun, the winter sucks. It's too cold to camp, it's hard to find a job, and when you do you still make as much as the guy who dropped out of high school. I'm beginning to consider this... as being covered in fiberglass and not able to take a shower does have its disadvantages. Yet... I still have at least one book to write, I have some river sections on my list I still haven't run, and I am going to need at least two more months in Utah's West Desert. So for now, this is my home. I'll drag it to Utah in the summer and live in it there. Did I mention my rent, including electricity and internet, is only $150 a month?

A happy homeowner

The Obama Administration is Not Calling for Mubarak's Immediate Departure

2011-02-08T15:59:00.013-07:00

I was reading an article on Egypt on Yahoo News. Yahoo News is a wonderful resource, and a valuable one from which to get a fresh perspective on the unfolding events in Egypt.

Unlike the many articles, videos, posts, and accounts I have been reading and watching these past weeks on Al Jazeera, Facebook, You Tube, The Daily Show, or Socialist Worker, Yahoo News has a broad enough readership to allow it to do a remarkable thing: report on official US positions on Mid East politics "objectively". This remarkable ability to take the words of press secretaries, department heads, and presidents at face value, with rather little snickering, editorializing, mocking, or tangent pointing out of the goddamned blatant hypocrisy of it all, is truly a rare and precious talent.

Reading the article I came across the following instructive paragraph:

"The Obama administration is not calling for Mubarak's immediate departure, saying a precipitous exit could set back the country's democratic transition. Under Egypt's constitution, Mubarak's resignation would trigger an election in 60 days. U.S. officials said that is not enough time to prepare..."

Apparently today, while Mubarak's security thugs are attacking and murdering peaceful protesters,the Obama administration remains under the impression that 60 more days of such treatment is far too little time for "democracy" to effectively germinate.

Clearly that man, and his cabinet, are all well experienced in foreign policy, democracy, and the governence of large, populous countries. I'm convinced that they must know what they are talking about. After all, they have been torturing prisoners in Guantonamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the basement of the Iraqi Interior Ministry building for almost 10 years and as yet, both Iraq and Afghanistan remain imperfect democracies. Clearly more time is needed. There are still doors to be kicked down, fathers to be dragged away at night, buildings to be bombed, and families to be machine gunned to death for failing to stop at checkpoints. Those Americans out there protesting the war, and those Egyptians out there protesting Mubarak, would do well to head these lessons and appreciate that fact.

As history has shown time and again, the interests of Egyptians would certainly best be served by the adoption of patience on the part of the protesters while the (benevolent) Western Power uses its influence on their dictator to secure a fitting democracy on their behalf. All this hasty and reckless protesting by such great numbers of untrained and unorganized citizens is no way to go about setting up a representative government. It's not like protesting and fighting in the street has ever got any nation closer to a republic!

America itself has always provided one of the most classic and instructive example of this process. In the end, it was years of calm and patient endurance of British imposed taxes and rule that finally resulted in the local governors coming to their senses, writing up a constitution, and funding candidates to run in carefully supervised elections for Americans to vote in. As all good students of American History have studied, life in the original 13 colonies during the years 1775-1783 was best characterized by a remarkable political stability. This was key to attracting much needed foreign direct investment, IMF loans, and tourist revenue- without which the citizens never would have been capable of eventually deciding on a proper form of government. Had George Washington been so rash as to organize a revolutionary army, imprison and hang British officers and political puppets, and call for immediate elections to an organically American continental congress, he would have messed it up completely! Hell, had that occurred, we'd probably be living today in some kind of chaotic failed state of declining living standards where the news is controlled by authoritarian demagogues and politically influential religious fundamentalists oppress women and minorities. Thank God and thank the democratizing "influence" of King George's State Department that we were able to avoid this fate! My only hope today is that the Egyptians, too, will recognize before it is too late that democracy can only be won by people who are brave enough to limit their demands to what is acceptable to autocrats and foreign governments.

Sarcasm aside, the sort of thinking evident in the quotation at the start of this article betrays the profound contempt for human life in the Middle East that has characterized the thinking of every American government that has ever given the matter any thought. The democratic demands of people who have been oppressed for 30 years come dead last to the strategic importance of the Suez Canal, oil, and the convenience of having friendly dictators in the region (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, etc...). What Obama, Hillary, Bush, Mubarak, King Abdullah, and their ilk fear more than anything is the direct "interference" of citizens in the political process. They have no conception of any political system not dominated by corporate money and not orchestrated by professional politicians with all the proper credentials of graduate degrees, internships, Foreign Affairs subscriptions and memberships in established political parties.

Barak Obama is a war criminal who escalated the Afghan war and continued the Iraq war. When Israel bombed Gaza he said nothing. When hated dictator Mubarak was about to topple he came out to prop up his crumbling regime. That man never got to where he is today because of his love for, or efficiency with, democracy. He is where he is today because his campaign was bought and paid for by the financial industry, the fossil fuel energy industry, and the pharmaceutical industry. Obama is a neo-colonialist in every sense of the word. The Egyptian people have nothing to gain from listening to his lies or waiting for the CIA to invent and install another puppet with a different name. Obama, like Bush, is an enemy of democracy and is today the greatest obstacle standing in the way of peace, democracy, and human rights in the Middle East.

Yankee Go Home. Long Live the Intifada!

The Egyptian Revolution

2011-01-28T17:20:00.003-07:00

I saw a picture on Al Jazeera of a tear gas canister. It said "Made in America" on it.

The US government continues its own support for the hated, tottering dictator Mubarak, despite the overwhelming citizen opposition to him

The people of Egypt, who are less impressed than Beltway politicians with the "stability" of the government they've been oppressed by for 30 years, are remaking the country in their own image.

This is more than the collapse of a dictatorship. Hopefully it is the collapse of the myth that the US government- Republican or Democrat- ever cared about "Democracy" in the Middle East. They have always preferred predictable "Strong Men" to the tumult of democracy from below.

Concerned Americans should at least be able to summon the courage to call the White House Switchboard and demand a hault to US support for the Mubarak regime. Their number is 202-456-1414 and the best time to call is between 9 am and 5 pm EST. There are also world wide protests at all Egyptian Embassies. Should there be one near you please do your best to protest / disrupt its operations.

Latest Savage Ideal Gets 7/8 on Side-Line

2011-01-25T23:03:00.002-07:00

As you probably know, myspace is not really used that much anymore by anyone, and I hadn't checked the Savage Ideal account in a while. Tonight I am sick with a cold, and unable to sleep. I got tired of playing snood and reading long articles. So I logged into the ms for the heck of it to see how it is doing these days.

Low and behold, it seems I had a message here back in December from an actual person! Sideline has completed their review of Ghosts Dance Lightly on the Puncheon Floor and wrote me to let me know about it. You can read it here:

http://www.side-line.com/reviews_comments.php?id=45603_0_17_0_C

We got 7/8!

Of course you can buy or download for free the album from Connexion Bizarre.

"Savage Ideal is a project set up by Christian Wright... a fascinating sonic experience where the artist is moving in between the edges of ambient and industrial music. The heavy industrial rhythmic is a rather constant element emerging from the songs. It creates a real outburst of power..."

I had mailed copies of the record out to 5 different magazines that expressed an interest in reviewing it back in July. This is the first review I've got back. But it is a good one.

Car Insurance

2011-01-21T12:54:00.001-07:00

How much do you pay?

Recently my vehicle was destroyed on black ice driving back from my job. That really pissed me off. People kept saying, "Don't worry, you are okay, and that is what is important." And I have been saying, "Are you fucking kidding? Do you know what it is like to buy a new car, and deal with insurance companies, and hitch hike to work until that happens?"

So for a month I've been about 50/50 getting rides from coworkers or hitch hiking to work, which is at a ski resort 32 miles away from my house. Today I am signing on a new vehicle.

I called progressive for a quote. They said $300 a month. I laughed.

I called Geico. Their website gave me a quote of $79, which was pretty sweet. However, when I called them, they raised the rate to $145 a month because I did not have insurance for the one month I was without a car, and because in the eyes of the insurance companies and US Courts the accident was my fault for hitting black ice and crashing. Not the ice's fault. No. The ice was granted complete innocence by the unelected, profit driven bureaucrats at the insurance company. Despite my recollection of the ice playing a principal role in my vehicle's decision to slam into a guard rail at 45 mph, and also irrespective of the fact that for the 99.99999999% of my life I have been driving on roads without any ice on them I have never slammed into a guard rail. I called the police but they didn't feel like sending anyone out to investigate the crash site. They did not interview the ice. They did not provide me with a court of law, jury of my peers, or opportunity to cross examine the ice in front of a judge.

This is what pissed me off so much about the wreck. I knew I'd be sitting here, at 12:47pm on my day off, calling insurance companies on the phone trying to get a deal. I knew I'd be ripped off by them. And I knew that even after I set something up I'd still have to walk two miles and then try to hitch hike to another state to pick the vehicle up.

I am excited about it being a new vehicle. Have never bought a new vehicle before. I went to a few dealers and played some off each other and got a slightly better deal, which I am happy about. Still, that being said, newer cars are more expensive to insure. This will be the last new car I purchase.

My plans for the future including drawing up a waiver I get all passengers to sign that forfeits their right to sue me if we get in a wreck. This is in part due to the fact that to get a better deal on insurance coverage I had to agree to drastically less medical coverage for myself / passengers in the event of a crash.

My other plan involves a utopian scheme to organize all proletarians to pool their wealth, to purchase millions of new cars, to have them sit in garages not being driven for 5-10 years, and then to be "sold" to members of the co-op as "used" vehicles, which will lower the insurance rates on them at the same time the drivers will be able to appreciate their condition.

* * *

What car insurance do you have? How much do you pay?

What kind of coverage do you have?

Are you frustrated with it? Happy with it?

Any tips for negotiating a better rate?

Ever switched companies? How did that go?

The Assassination of Gabrielle Giffords

2011-01-10T08:55:00.002-07:00

The FCC's plan of allowing a handful of corporations to monopolize the public airwaves has ironically resulted in the day to day broadcast of lynch mob politics, death threats and incitement to anti-government violence. Once again... as we've seen with the SEC and the EPA, the existence of a regulatory agency is meaningless if the government itself is controlled by industry.

Two articles:

FOX News: The Number 1 Name in Murder Fantasies

Tuscon Rampage Casts Light on Toxic Political Tone

Of course, the Gun Control issue is already being raised. But I think this misses the point completely. The problem here is that of an FCC licensed news organization encouraging its listeners and viewers to act out on their murderous fantasies. This is the thing that needs to be fought and its effects will prove deadly whether or not FOX viewers use guns, pipe bombs, or Ryder trucks full of house hold chemicals. Is this latest shooter really that much more dangerous than Eric Roudolph or Timothy McVeigh?

The irony here is that the biggest proponents of gun control tend to do very little, in the day to day, to stand up for progressive issues and politically confront today's Neo-McCarthyites- the only thing that can balance our political climate. Obama talking about reaching out for "bipartisanship" while FOX commentators are basically calling for the assassination of Democrats will go down in history as an example of what it means to be completely out of touch with political reality.

I will also point out that the people who support banning certain types of weapons within the 50 states often do the most to facilitate their export around the world, often to repressive governments where they've been responsible for thousands of deaths. International arms sales actually declined in the first two years after Hillary left the White House. See my article.

It's not because people have guns that they shoot elected officials. It's because demagogues like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck and their ilk are whipping up violence and hatred among the most paranoid, ignorant, and impressionable people in society. It is there the problem lies and it is there a solution must be found.